"

"What do you want?" Helen repeated.

They were both using a tone intended to indicate that they were enemies
from everlasting to everlasting, and that mere words could not express
the intensity of their mutual hatred and scorn. The casual distant
observer might have conceived the encounter to be a love idyll.

There was a short silence.

"I broke off my engagement last night," Andrew Dean muttered,
ferociously.

"Really!" Helen commented.

"You don't seem to care."

"I don't see what it has to do with me. But if you talked to Lilian
Swetnam in the same nice agreeable manner that you talk to me, I can't
say I'm surprised to hear that she broke with you."

"Who told you _she_ broke?" Andrew demanded.

"I guessed," said Helen. "You'd never have had the courage to break it
off yourself."

Andrew made a vicious movement.

"If you mean to serve me as you served Emanuel," she remarked, with
bitter calm, "please do it as gently as you can. And don't throw me far.
I can only swim a little."

Andrew walked away.

"Good-night," she called.

"Look here!" he snarled coming back to her "What's the matter with you?
I know I oughtn't to have asked Lilian to marry me. Everybody knows
that. It's universally agreed. But are you going to make that an excuse
for spoiling the whole show? What's up with you is pride."

"And what is up with you?" she inquired.

"Pride," said he. "How could I know you were in love with me all the
time? How could----"

"You couldn't," said Helen. "I wasn't. No more than you were with me."

"If you weren't in love with me, why did you try to make me jealous?"

"Me try to make you jealous!" she exclaimed, disdainfully. "You flatter
yourself, Mr. Dean!"

"I can stand a good deal, but I can't stand lies, and I won't!" he
exploded. "I say you did try to make me jealous."

He then noticed that she was crying.

The duologue might have extended itself indefinitely if her tears had
not excited him to uncontrollable fury, to that instinctive cruelty that
every male is capable of under certain conditions. Without asking her
permission, without uttering a word of warning, he rushed at her and
seized her in his arms. He crushed her with the whole of his very
considerable strength. And he added insult to injury by kissing her
about forty seven times. Women are such strange, incalculable creatures.
Helen did not protest. She did not invoke the protection of Heaven. She
existed, passively and si