Maitland
near you, and that I did not know at the first glance what part he was
playing in your life? You did not think I might have good reasons for
returning as I did? You did not know that one does not dally with one
whom one loves as I love you?... It is not true.... You have not been
loyal to me, since you took this man for a lover while you were still my
mistress. You had not the right, no, no, no, you had not the right!...
And what a man!... If it had been Ardea, Dorsenne, no matter whom,
that I might not blush for you.... But that brute, that idiot, who has
nothing in his favor, neither good looks, birth, elegance, mind nor
talent, for he has none--he has nothing but his neck and shoulders of a
bull.... It is as if you had deceived me with a lackey.... No..... it is
too terrible.... Ah, Catherine, swear to me that it is not true. Tell me
that you no longer love me, I will submit, I will go away, I will accept
all, provided that you swear to me you do not love that man--swear,
swear!"... he added, grasping her hands with such violence that she
uttered a slight exclamation, and, disengaging herself, said to him:

"Cease; you pain me. You are mad, Gorka; that can be your sole
excuse.... I have nothing to swear to you. What I feel, what I think,
what I do no longer concerns you after what I have told you.... Believe
what it pleases you to believe.... But," and the irritation of an
enamored woman, wounded in the man she adores, possessed her, "you shall
not speak twice of one of my friends as you have just spoken. You
have deeply offended me, and I will not pardon you. In place of
the friendship I offered you so honestly, we will have no further
connections excepting those of society. That is what you desired.... Try
not to render them impossible to yourself. Be correct at least in form.
Remember you have a wife, I have a daughter, and that we owe it to
them to spare them the knowledge of this unhappy rupture.... God is my
witness, I wished to have it otherwise."

"My wife! Your daughter!" cried Boleslas with bitterness. "This is
indeed the hour to remember them and to put them between you and my just
vengeance! They never troubled you formerly, the two poor creatures,
when you began to win my love?... It was convenient for you that
they should be friends! And I lent myself to it!... I accepted
such baseness--that to-day you might take shelter behind the two
innocents!... No, it shall not be.... you shall not escap