'Despise, no!' she said, with a little gesture of depreciation; 'that is too strong. Why should I despise them for acting according to their natures? I do not desire cartouche-boxes myself, but I did not despise Sachs.'
'I told you in Paris,' pursued Othmar, 'that I would not add one to the list of those whom you have made ridiculous in the eyes of the world. I will be all to a woman, or nothing to her. You would have let me swell the cortège that marks your triumphal passage; you would have let me fill the place that Lord Geraldine occupies now. You would have allowed me to drive with you, dine with you, come in and out of your house, take your husband away when he bored you, do everything that Lord Geraldine is permitted to do now; and you would have repaid me as you repay him, by a little laugh, a smile now and then, a vague liking which would have grown, little by little, into contempt! I would not accept that place in your household. I would not then. I left you, though it cost me more than you would ever know or pity, for you do not understand what love is. I went away; I desired to escape from you. I did escape. I desired also to forget you, but I could not forget. You are not a woman who can be forgotten; you are like one of those _miséricordes_ with which they stabbed men in the Valois days, that look like mere threads of silver sheathed in velvet, and yet can go home through breast and bone, and kill more surely than swords that are as high as a man's shoulder----'
He paused a moment; he breathed quickly and heavily; she looked up, holding her little cigarette suspended:
'I am like a great many things,' she murmured; 'I thought Wilkes exhausted all possibilities in comparison this morning. Go on! you are very _entreprenant_, but it rather becomes you; you may go on if you like.'
'No, I would not be what Geraldine is; you tolerate him now, to scorn him immeasurably hereafter. His own weakness will be the measure of your scorn. He has never dared to say to you what I said to you in Paris, what I say now: love me, or I will not see your face again, except as society may compel me to see it in a crowd. Listen, Nadine! I love you, only you; I never thought to love any woman so; but I love you as men did in the old times, and there is nothing I will not surrender to you save my own self-respect. If to meet you, to touch your hand, to hear your voice, I must come and go like a dog in your husband's house, petted one day, chidden the next, absurd in my own sight and emasculated in the sight of others, I will wrench my love for you out of my life if my life goes with it! Last night I heard someone who did not know him inquire who Geraldine was; someone else answered him, "Oh, that is one of Princess Napraxine's _ensorcelés_; she never looks at him, but he is content to follow her shadow." You know me very little if you believe I would ever let the world speak of me like that. I told you in Paris I would never be the trembling valet of a bloodless Platonism!'