you've paid all you owe, and more, to Oscar. Don't you owe something to yourself?"
It was taking much for granted to assume that if she paid what she owed to herself it would be to him that she would turn, but he must take that for granted; he must assume it from her very willingness to listen, from the memory of last night!
She looked at him with steady eyes, while the lips—puckered into a whimsical smile which seemed to him to say, Though many men, and strange ones too, have besieged me, you're the most strangely argumentative of the lot. Others plead with their bodies; your body is mute and your words are badly representing it. Before his eyes she had grown into a mature woman facing facts honestly, though, as he felt, from a wrong angle; and now she was the dissembling girl of twenty again.
"Come and dry the crockery while I wash it," she said, springing up from her chair, and reaching for his hand to lead him off. "Then we'll go to Enghien together."
There's not a woman on earth, he was bitterly reflecting, but loves to dance on a moral precipice. Not a woman on earth but would, in evading the main issue, hold out a hope to be caught at. It would be kinder, he was thinking, if she would turn me out to die of my malady. Yet like all men he was desperately glad of the sop she had flung to him. What might one
