Do you ?" "I?
A--a rupture ?" "Yes," she said hotly; "do you ?" "Do you, Sylvia ?" "No; I'm too cowardly, too selfish, too treacherous to myself.

No, I don't." "Nor do I," he said, lifting his furtive eyes.
"Very well.

You are more contemptible than I am, that is all." Her voice had grown unsteady; an unreasoning rush of anger had set her whole body a-thrill, and the white heat of it was driving her to provoke him, as though that might cleanse her of the ignominy of the bargain--as though a bargain did not require two of the same mind to make it.
"What do you want of me ?" she said, still stinging under the angry waves of self-contempt.

"What are you marrying me for?
Because, divided, we are likely to cut small figures in our tin-trumpet world?
Because, united, we can dominate the brainless?
Is there any other reason ?" Showing his teeth in that twitching snicker that contracted the muscles of his upper lip: "Children!" he said, looking at her.
She turned scarlet to her hair; the deliberate grossness stunned her.
Confused, she stood confronting him, dumb under a retort the coarseness of which she had never dreamed him capable.
"I mean what I say," he repeated calmly.

"A man cares for two things: his fortune, and the heirs to it.