What a mockery of hope! On those journeys of his, roused from his acquiescence in ill-health and failure, moved by a savage determination, he had accomplished the impossible, in body and character had exceeded his limitations. He had taken as his pattern the rival whom she had preferred. He had built up in himself the counterfeits of those qualities by which Lawrence Teck had won her. Yet now he must see her devoting herself to a man who was the antithesis of all that she had previously preferred.
It was unendurable! But how was he to escape it? By hating her? Yes, surely she was worthy of his hatred, heartless, cruel, the cause of all these innumerable torments from which he sometimes got a moment of madness.
"What do I see in you?" he said between his teeth.
She had on a copper-colored gown hung over her slender shoulders by two straps. Maybe because its hue was a deeper shade of the same color as her hair, her eyes, and even her pale-brown skin, the costume seemed part of her. He could see nothing about her that was not exquisite—no detail from which to build up a remedial distaste. So he ground out at her:
"Your nature? What rot!—as if that ever attracted me, with its false pretenses of heart, its instabilities and downright treacheries. What else do you offer? This that I see? What we human fools call beauty? What is beauty?"
She sat down in despair, observing that even his jaws, under his heavy mustache, looked more salient. It was almost laughable, she thought; but she was far from laughing. Every moment she expected to hear the doorbell.
He continued ferociously:
"In the beginning these arms and legs of yours were nothing but appliances for hanging from trees and running away from wild beasts. Your body was merely a convenient case for a machine that kept your life ticking along. How does one get the idea that all this is good-looking? Ages ago men decided to think so for reasons that have nothing to do with esthetics; they passed the hoax on, and in time these physical features got themselves surrounded with a perfect fog of sentimental and romantic balderdash. Take your face. Your nose is bridged in that so-called ravishing way in order to let a stream of air into your lungs. Your eyebrows—how many sonnets have been written on eyebrows!—are there, in the first place, to keep the perspiration from running into your eyes. Your lips are merely a binding against the friction of food. How grotesque to find such expedients beautiful! No doubt in other planets there are creatures that you'd call monsters; and they'd call you hideous. In fact, there can't be any such thing as beauty."
"No doubt you're right, Cornie dear," she responded, looking down at her beautiful hands.
"And what's it all for?" he ejaculated, in a stupefied kind of horror. "All this sordid consolidation of flesh and blood, this disgusting hallucination of attractiveness? All for——"