"But yourself—your body—you will give that to him?"
She closed her eyes and turned ghastly white as she whispered: "I suppose so. That's the usual price a woman pays, isn't it?"
He flung her from him as something unclean, common, cheap.
From the huddle she was in she whispered:
"I understand. I—I don't blame you."
There was a sort of burlesque saintliness about her meekness that nauseated him. He did not realize that she forgave him because his rage seemed a proof of his love. She would have forgiven him with bruised lips if he had struck her in the face.
He loathed himself for his vicious wrath, but he almost loathed her more for compelling it. Yet when she got to her feet and stood clinging to the velvet curtain, and mumbled:
"It was better that this happened before we were married, wasn't it? And now that you are cured of loving me I may go, mayn't I?"
He stared at her; his lips parted to utter words he could not find; he put out his hands, and she went back to his arms. And she cried a little, not forgetting even in her grief to sob stealthily lest some one hear. And he understood that, too, and hated her for her eternal vigilance. Even while he kissed the brackish tears from her cheeks and eyes he hated her for being so beautiful and so wise, so full of passion and so discreet.
She wept but a little while, and then she was quiet, reclining against him in silence and meditating.