She turned on him in a flash of passion.
“If you say such things, you will make me marry you out of humiliation and remorse.”
“God forbid I should do that,” said Martin.
She averted her head again. There was a span of silence. At the extreme end of the long deserted verandah, beneath the sun-baked awning, with only the occasional clatter of a carriage or the whirr of a motor breaking the stillness of this drowsy embankment of the Nile, they might have been miles away in the desert solitude under the palm-tree of Fortinbras’s dream.
Lucilla was the first to speak. “It is I who am to blame for everything. No; let me talk. I’ve got the courage to talk straight and you’ve got the courage to listen. You interested me at Brantôme. Your position there was so un-English. Of course I liked you. I thought you ought to be roused from stagnation. It was just idle fancy that made me talk about Egypt. I thought it would do you good to cut everything and see the world. When I took Félise away with me and saw how she expanded and developed, I thought of you. I’ve done the same often before with girls, like Félise, who have never been given a chance, and it has been a fascinating amusement. I had never made the experiment with a man. I wanted to see how you would shape, what kind of impression all the new kind of life would make on you. I realise it now, but till now I haven’t, that all my so-called kindnesses to girls have been heartless experimenting. I could keep twenty girls in luxury for twenty years without considering the expense. That’s the curse of unlimited money! one abuses its power. . . . With you, of course, money didn’t come in. I hadn’t the insanity to ask you to be my guest, as I could ask young women. But money aside, I knew I could give you what I gave them; and from what Félise let drop I gathered you had some little private means. So I wrote to you—on the off-chance. I thought you would come. People, have a way of doing what I ask them. You were going to be the most fascinating amusement of all. You see, that’s how it was.”
She paused. His face hardened. “Well,” said he, “go on.”
“Can’t you guess the rest?”
“No,” said he, “I can’t.”
There was a note in his voice that seemed to tear her heart. She pressed both hands to her eyes.
“If you knew how I despise and hate myself!”