the force that lay beneath his words.

"You are incredibly ungrateful," he said. "You are talking arrogant
nonsense. What do you know about my sensibilities and my imagination?
How do you know whether I have loved or suffered? If I have held my
tongue and not troubled you with my complaints, you find it the most
natural thing in the world to put an ignoble construction on my silence.
I loved quite as well as you; indeed, I think I may say rather better. I
have been constant. I have been willing to give more than I received. I
have not forsaken one mistress because I thought another more beautiful,
nor given up the other and believed all manner of evil about her because
I had not my way with her. I have been a good friend to Christina Light,
and it seems to me my friendship does her quite as much honor as your
love!"

"Your love--your suffering--your silence--your friendship!" cried
Roderick. "I declare I don't understand!"

"I dare say not. You are not used to understanding such things--you are
not used to hearing me talk of my feelings. You are altogether too
much taken up with your own. Be as much so as you please; I have always
respected your right. Only when I have kept myself in durance on purpose
to leave you an open field, don't, by way of thanking me, come and call
me an idiot."

"Oh, you claim then that you have made sacrifices?"

"Several! You have never suspected it?"

"If I had, do you suppose I would have allowed it?" cried Roderick.

"They were the sacrifices of friendship and they were easily made; only
I don't enjoy having them thrown back in my teeth."

This was, under the circumstances, a sufficiently generous speech; but
Roderick was not in the humor to take it generously. "Come, be more
definite," he said. "Let me know where it is the shoe has pinched."

Rowland frowned; if Roderick would not take generosity, he should have
full justice. "It 's a perpetual sacrifice," he said, "to live with a
perfect egotist."

"I am an egotist?" cried Roderick.

"Did it never occur to you?"

"An egotist to whom you have made perpetual sacrifices?" He repeated
the words in a singular tone; a tone that denoted neither exactly
indignation nor incredulity, but (strange as it may seem) a sudden
violent curiosity for news about himself.

"You are selfish," said Rowland; "you think only of yourself and believe
only in yourself. You regard other people only as they play into your
own hands. You have always