'Have you tormented me long enough?'
'Very well: I am in love with the Islands, and with nothing and nobody else.'
'Then why had Fru Thyregod her hair down her back? you're lying to me, and I despise you doubly for it,' she reverted, humble no longer, but aggressive.
'Fru Thyregod again?' he said, bewildered.
'How little I trust you,' she broke out; 'I believe that you deceive me at every turn. Kato, too; you spend hours in Kato's flat. What do you do there? You write letters to people of whom I have never heard. You dined with the Thyregods twice last week. Kato sends you notes by hand from Herakleion when you are in the country. You use the Islands as dust to throw in my eyes, but I am not blinded.'
'I have had enough of this!' he cried.
'You are like everybody else,' she insisted; 'you enjoy mean entanglements, and you cherish the idea of marriage. You want a home, like everybody else. A faithful wife. Children. I loathe children,' she said violently. 'You are very different from me. You are tame. I have deluded myself into thinking we were alike. You are tame, respectable. A good citizen. You have all the virtues. I will live to show you how different we are. Ten years hence, you will say to your wife, "No, my dear, I really cannot allow you to know that poor Eve." And your wife, well trained, submissive, will agree.'
He shrugged his shoulders, accustomed to such storms, and knowing that she only sought to goad him into a rage.
'In the meantime, go back to Fru Thyregod; why trouble to lie to me? And to Kato, go back to Kato. Write to the woman in England, too. I will go to Miloradovitch, or to any of the others.'
He was betrayed into saying,—