f subservience with you--and with everybody. I hate it.'

'No,' she cried, pressing back her head like a cobra, her eyes
flashing. 'It is a process of pride--I want to be proud--'

'Proud and subservient, proud and subservient, I know you,' he retorted
dryly. 'Proud and subservient, then subservient to the proud--I know
you and your love. It is a tick-tack, tick-tack, a dance of opposites.'

'Are you sure?' she mocked wickedly, 'what my love is?'

'Yes, I am,' he retorted.

'So cocksure!' she said. 'How can anybody ever be right, who is so
cocksure? It shows you are wrong.'

He was silent in chagrin.

They had talked and struggled till they were both wearied out.

'Tell me about yourself and your people,' he said.

And she told him about the Brangwens, and about her mother, and about
Skrebensky, her first love, and about her later experiences. He sat
very still, watching her as she talked. And he seemed to listen with
reverence. Her face was beautiful and full of baffled light as she told
him all the things that had hurt her or perplexed her so deeply. He
seemed to warm and comfort his soul at the beautiful light of her
nature.

'If she REALLY could pledge herself,' he thought to himself, with
passionate insistence but hardly any hope. Yet a curious little
irresponsible laughter appeared in his heart.

'We have all suffered so much,' he mocked, ironically.

She looked up at him, and a flash of wild gaiety went over her face, a
strange flash of yellow light coming from her eyes.

'Haven't we!' she cried, in a high, reckless cry. 'It is almost absurd,
isn't it?'

'Quite absurd,' he said. 'Suffering bores me, any more.'

'So it does me.'

He was almost afraid of the mocking recklessness of her splendid face.
Here was one who would go to the whole lengths of heaven or hell,
whichever she had to go. And he mistrusted her, he was afraid of a
woman capable of such abandon, such dangerous thoroughness of
destructivity. Yet he chuckled within himself also.

She came over to him and put her hand on his shoulder, looking down at
him with strange golden-lighted eyes, very tender, but with a curious
devilish look lurking underneath.

'Say you love me, say "my love" to me,' she pleaded

He looked back into her eyes, and saw. His face flickered with sardonic
comprehension.

'I love you right enough,' he said, grimly. 'But I want it to be
something else.'

'But why? But why?' she insisted, bending her wonderf