h like your style of expression. It is
the second time you have addressed me as an accuser, and if you assume
that attitude it will be useless to continue."

"Catherine!".... That cry of the young man, whose anger was increasing,
decided her whom he thus addressed to precipitate the issue of a
conversation in which each reply was to be a fresh burst of rancor.

"Well?" she inquired, crossing her arms in a manner so imperious that
he paused in his menace, and she continued: "Listen, Boleslas, we have
talked ten minutes without saying anything, because neither of us has
the courage to put the question such as we know and feel it to be.
Instead of writing to me, as you did, letters which rendered replies
impossible to me; instead of returning to Rome and hiding yourself
like a malefactor; instead of coming to my home last night with that
threatening face; instead of approaching me this morning with the
solemnity of a judge, why did you not question me simply, frankly, as
one who knows that I have loved him very, very much?... Having been
lovers, is that a reason for detesting each other when we cease those
relations?"

"'When we cease those relations!'" replied Gorka. "So you no longer
love me? Ah, I knew it; I guessed it after the first week of that fatal
absence! But to think that you should tell it to me some day like that,
in that calm voice which is a horrible blasphemy for our entire
past. No, I do not believe it. I do not yet believe it. Ah, it is too
infamous."

"Why?" interrupted the Countess, raising her head with still more
haughtiness.... "There is only one thing infamous in love, and that is
a falsehood. Ah, I know it. You men are not accustomed to meeting true
women, who have the respect, the religion of their sentiment. I have
that respect; I practise that religion. I repeat that I loved you a
great deal, Boleslas. I did not hide it from you formerly. I was as
loyal to you as truth itself. I have the consciousness of being so
still, in offering you, as I do, a firm friendship, the friendship
of man for man, who only asks to prove to you the sincerity of his
devotion."

"I, a friendship with you, I--I--I?" exclaimed Boleslas. "Have I had
enough patience in listening to you as I have listened? I heard you lie
to me and scented the lie in the same breath. Why do you not ask me as
well to form a friendship for him with whom you have replaced me? Ah,
so you think I am blind, and you fancy I did not see that