"Oh, my dear Jack," said Dodo impatiently, "you really make me angry. It is dreadfully bad form to be angry, and it is absurd that you and I should quarrel. You've got such a low opinion of me; though I suppose that's as much my fault as yours. Your opinion is fiction, but I am the fact on which it is founded, and what do you take me for? The Prince telegraphed from Dover to ask if I would see him, and I deliberately sent no answer. How he found out where I was I don't know. I suppose he got hold of the telegram I sent here to say my address was uncertain. Does that look as if I wanted to see him so dreadfully?"
"I never said you did want to see him," said Jack. "I said he very much wanted to see you, and what you say proves it."
"Well, what then?" said Dodo. "You wanted to see me very much when I was married. Would you have thought it reasonable if Chesterford had entreated me never to see you--to keep away for God's sake, as you said just now?"
"I am not the Prince," said Jack, "neither am I going to be treated as you treated your husband. Do not let us refer to him again; it is a desecration."
"You mean that in the light of subsequent events it would have been reasonable in him to ask me to keep away from you?"
Jack looked Dodo full in the face, in the noble shame of a confessed sin: In that moment he was greater, perhaps, and had risen higher above his vague self-satisfied indifference than ever before. Dodo felt it, and it irritated her, it seemed positively unpardonable.
"Perhaps you do not see that you involve me in your confession," she said with cold scorn. "I decline to be judged by your standards, thanks."
Jack felt a sudden immense pity and anger for her. She would not, or could not, accept the existence of other points of view than her own.
"Apparently you decline to consider the fact of other standards at all."
"I don't accept views which seem to me unreasonable," she said.
"I only ask you to consider this particular view. The story you have just told me shows that he is anxious to see you, which was my point. That he is dangerous and strong I ask you to accept."
"This," said he. "When a man of that sort desires anything, as he evidently desires you, there is danger. If you are alive to it, and as strong as he is, you are safe. That you are not alive to it you show by your present position; that you are as strong as he, I doubt."