She looked at him for a moment, then, resting her hands on her hips, she began to pace the floor, to and fro, to and fro, and at every turn she raised her head to look at him.
All the strange grace of her became insolent provocation--her pale eyes, clear, limpid, harbouring no delusions, haunted with the mockery of wisdom, challenged and checked him.

"Howard," she said, "why should I be the fool you want me to be because I love you?
Why should I be even if I wished to be?
You desire an understanding?
Voila! You have it.

I love you; I never misunderstood you from the first; I could not afford to.
You know what I am; you know what you arouse in me ?" Slim, pale, depraved in all but body she stood, eyeing him a moment, the very incarnation of vicious perversity.
"You know what you arouse in me," she repeated.

"But don't count on it!" "You have encouraged--permitted me to count--" His anger choked him--or was it the haunting wisdom of her eyes that committed him to silence.
"I don't know," she said, musingly, "what it is in you that I am so mad about--whether it is your brutality, or the utter corruption of you that holds me, or your wicked eyes of a woman, or the fascination of the mask you turn on the world, and the secret visage, naked in its vice, that you reserve for me.

But I love you--in my own fashion.