"Unclasp this earring. Thank you!" She lifted one foot and then the other and tore the buckles from her shoes. She did not hesitate above that bewildering heap, but pushed closer and closer together those fallen stars and serpents of bright light. "There!" she cried. "Are they all there? No—here!" At her breast there was still a quivering point or two; she wrenched off the lace that held them and flung it on the pile. "There!" she said again, "they are all there! My poor fellow, I have changed my mind."
She walked away and leaned her forehead on the tall mantelshelf.
Whence she was perhaps prepared to have him turn her round and holding her by the wrists say to her through stiff lips,—"Explain yourself!" He shook from head to foot with temper; doubtless, too, with the scandalous outrage to commonsense.
"There is so little to explain. I thought I could. I can't! It wouldn't pay!"
"Not pay!"
"Oh," said Christina, indicating, with a scornful glance, the mirrored, golden room and piled-up jewels, "these were only incidents! Try to understand. Long ago, when I was a child, I set out to vanquish the world. Not to belong to it, not to be of it, but to have it under foot! I was so poor, so weak, so unbefriended. I thought it would be a fine day when I could give this great, contemptuous, cold, self-satisfied world a little push with my shoe and pass it by. It was a childish ambition—well, in some ways I have never grown up! And to me, since our first encounter, you have always typified that world."
He started back, and released her hands.
"All that I really wanted I won for myself last week! And Allegra stole from me when I saw her hair! You tell me that you can save it for me in saving her, but it's not true! It was easy to think of you as the world, to feel that you were giving me yourself and it to play with! It's easy to imagine that you would be under my heel.—No, I should be under yours! I shouldn't have vanquished the world, I should be vanquished by it!—No, I thank you!"
"And Allegra?" he asked her, grimly.
Christina shuddered and closed her eyes. But she said, "Has Allegra been so tender to me that I should lose myself for her? Understand me, it never was for Allegra that I came here to-night. Ah, Ten Euyck, I have been a good sister. It is time I thought of myself."