and get it over? Are you waiting to clothe your phrases? Are you afraid
of the naked words? I'm not. Let me hear them. Don't be more melodramatic
than you can help because, as you know, I am cursed with a sense of
humour, but don't stand there saying nothing."

He raised his eyes and looked at her in silence, an alternative which she
found it hard to endure. Then, after a moment's shivering recoil into her
chair, she sprang to her feet.

"Listen," she cried passionately, "I don't care what you think! I tell
you that if you were really a man, if you had a man's heart in your body,
you'd have sinned yourself before now--robbed some one, murdered them,
torn the things that make life from the fate that refuses to give them.
What is it they pay you," she went on contemptuously, "at that miserable
art school of yours? Sixty pounds a year! How much do you get to eat and
drink out of that? What sort of clothes have you to wear? Are you
content? Yet even you have been better off than I. You have always your
chance. Your play may be accepted or your stories published. I haven't
even had that forlorn hope. But even you, Philip, may wait too long.
There are too many laws, nowadays, for life to be lived naturally. If I
were a man, a man like you, I'd break them."

Her taunts apparently moved him no more than the inner tragedy which her
words had revealed. He did not for one moment give any sign of abandoning
the unnatural calm which seemed to have descended upon him. He took up
his hat from the table, and thrust the little brown paper parcel which he
had been carrying, into his pocket. His eyes for a single moment met the
challenge of hers, and again she was conscious of some nameless,
inexplicable fear.

"Perhaps," he said, as he turned away, "I may do that."

His hand was upon the latch before she realized that he was actually
going. She sprang to her feet. Abuse, scorn, upbraidings, even
violence--she had been prepared for all of these. There was something
about this self-restraint, however, this strange, brooding silence, which
terrified her more than anything she could have imagined.

"Philip!" she shrieked. "You're not going? You're not going like this?
You haven't said anything!"

He closed the door with firm fingers. Her knees trembled, she was
conscious of an unexpected weakness. She abandoned her first intention of
following him, and stood before the window, holding tightly to the sash.
He had reached the gate now a