"So—you have done it," she said in a curiously altered voice, but her lips scarcely moved when she spoke.
He did not answer, but in her level eyes he saw blue lightning glimmer.
"You did your best," he said. "Your conscience is clear. Nobody can reproach you."
"Do you understand," she said in a low, expressionless voice, "that I am your enemy?"
"Do you reason that way, Karen?"
"Reason?"
"Yes. Reason it out, Karen, before you come to such a conclusion."
She said, very quietly: "A woman takes a shorter cut to her conclusions than by reasoning. As I did with you ... when I gave you my friendship ... unasked—" She turned her head swiftly, and sat for a moment while the starting tears dried in her eyes, unshed. They dried slowly while the battle raged within her—combat of mind and heart with every outraged instinct in arms, every emotion, every impulse. Pride, belief, faith, tenderness—all desperately wounded, fought blindly in the assault upon her heart, seeming to tear it to a thousand bleeding fragments.
Perhaps, like the fair body of Osiris, it was immortal—a deathless, imperishable thing—or that what had come into it had become indestructible. For, after her heart lay in burning fragments within her, she turned and looked at him, and in her eyes was all the tragedy of her sex—and all its never-ending mystery to men.
"I must end what I have begun," he said gently.