He gazed at her, trying to read the difficult riddle of a woman's perversity. "You were in love with me yesterday," he said at last.
"No: never," she answered, looking quietly at him. "What is there in you to love?"
Sir Hugh flushed. "I say! You are hard on me!"
"I see nothing loveable in you," said Amabel with her inflexible gentleness. "I loved you because I thought you noble and magnanimous; but you were neither. You only did not cast me off, as I deserved, because you could not; and you were kind partly because you are kind by nature, but partly because my money was convenient to you. I do not say that you were ignoble; you were in a very false position. And I had wronged you; I had committed the greater social crime; but there was nothing noble; you must see that; and it was for that I loved you."
Sir Hugh now got up and paced up and down near her.
"So you are going to cast me off because I had no opportunity for showing nobility. How do you know I couldn't have behaved as you believed I did behave, if only I'd had the chance? You know--you are hard on me."
"I see no sign of nobility--towards anyone--in your life," Amabel answered as dispassionately as before.
"I did feel like a brute about the money sometimes," he remarked;--"especially that last time; I wanted you to have the house as a sort of salve to my conscience; I've taken almost all your money, you know; it's quite true. As to the rest--what Augustine calls my dissoluteness--I can't pretend to take your view; a nun's view." He looked at her. "How beautiful you are with that white round your face," he said. "You are like a woman of snow."
She looked back at him as though, from the unhesitating steadiness of her gaze, to lend him some of her own clearness.
"Don't you see that it's not real? Don't you see that it's because you suddenly find me beautiful, and because, as a woman of snow, I allure you, that you think you love me? Do you really deceive yourself?"
He stared at her; but the ray only illumined the bewilderment of his dispossession. "I don't pretend to be an idealist," he said, stopping still before her; "I don't pretend that it's not because I suddenly find you beautiful; that's one reason; and a very essential one, I think; but there are other reasons, lots of them. Amabel--you must see that my love for you is an entirely different sort of thing from what my love for her ever was."