Isabel laughed. ‘Oh, this dry and tedious discussion!’ she cried. ‘How many men would hair-split and quibble like this? Thank God, I have blood in my veins! My people never cared where or whom or why they loved. They took their pleasure where they found it. They were above all laws but their own desires. No silly conventions and superstitions ruled them. They were big, passionate men and women, with life in their veins, not sawdust.’
‘Do you care nothing, absolutely nothing,’ he asked, ‘for--well, for feeling that you have behaved as cleanly as you can? Nothing for consequences? Nothing for anything but the pleasure of the moment?’
‘It is in my blood,’ repeated Isabel arrogantly, investing the crude horror of her selfishness with a certain barbaric grandeur. ‘You know how I hate these huckstering considerations of yours. My self-respect is involved in getting what I want. Defeat is my only shame. And consequences--who cares for them? I know,’ she went on, giving the quotation with proud defiance--‘“I know that about this time there is a prophecy that a Queen of England is to be burned, but I care nothing if I be she, so that I have and hold the love of the King.” The love of my King I have and I hold; what does the rest signify? I told you Queen Anne and I were cousins.’
‘How I wish,’ he said--‘oh, how I wish to God I could make you understand what I feel. I feel the most contemptible beast on the earth; you alone can help me to win back a little of what I have lost. If only you would make it easier for me, Isabel--if only you would make it easier for me, by believing how ghastly hard it is.’
‘Yes; hard, hard, hard,’ said Isabel--‘hard I believe it is,’ she repeated, meeting the anguish and the struggle of his gaze. ‘And I want to make it harder. I want to make it impossible. Find yourself, Kingston--know yourself. Don’t go on tormenting us both with scruples and neurotic nonsense.’
He rose and stared down at her with furious eyes. ‘You are pitiless,’ he said--‘altogether horrible and evil. There’s no decency or civilization in you. You are as fierce as a savage. As I listen to you I hate you; every fibre in me hates and dreads you.’
Isabel rose also and faced him. ‘And when you look at me?’ she asked.