N-no one's going to play fast and loose with me.
No, by God! I'll see her--she's got to have it out with me. I've a
right to an explanation at least--and by God I'll have one!"

"For what?" Stonehouse asked.

"She loved me," Cosgrave retorted.

"I don't believe it."

"You d-don't believe it? W-what do you know about it? Didn't she
behave as though she did? Didn't she go about with me? Didn't she
take things from me--no decent woman would have taken unless she loved
me?"

"She doesn't happen to be a decent woman," Stonehouse observed. "To do
her justice she doesn't pretend to be one."

Cosgrave advanced upon him as though he would have struck him across
the face. But he stopped in time, not from remorse, but as though
pulled up by a revelation of maddening absurdity.

"Oh, you--you! You don't understand. You aren't capable of
understanding. You're a block--a machine--you don't feel--you g-go
about--rolling over p-people and things like--like a damned
steam-roller. You're not a man at all. You don't love anyone--not
even yourself. What do you know about anything?"

He was grotesque in his scorn, and yet Stonehouse, leaning with an
apparent negligence against the mantel-shelf, felt himself go dead
white under the attack. He had lost Cosgrave. And he knew now that he
needed him desperately--more now than even in his desolate
childhood--that unconsciously he had hugged the knowledge of that
boyish affection and dependence to him with a secret pride as a
talisman against he hardly knew what--utter isolation, a terrifying
hardness. He made up his mind to have done now with reserve, to show
before it was too late at least some of that dwarfed and suffocated
feeling. But he faltered over his first sentence. He had trained
himself too long and too carefully to speak with that cold, ironic
inflexion. He sounded in his own ears formal--unconvincing.

"You're wrong. I do care. I care for you. You're my friend. I do
understand, in part, at any rate. I can prove it. When I saw how
unhappy you were I went to her--I tried to reason with her."

He broke off altogether under the amazed stare that greeted this
statement. The next instant Cosgrave had tossed his hands to heaven,
shouting with a ribald laughter:

"Oh, my Heaven--you poor fish! You think you can cure everything. I
can imagine what you said: 'I suggest, Mademoiselle, that you reduce
the doses gradually.'"

It was so nearly what he h