I remember one of these contentions. She is abominably rouged, and before me she is grovelling, as she must have seen some actress do upon the stage.
"Oh, I lied to you," she wailed; "but you are so cruel! Ah, don't be cruel, Jack!"
Then I lifted the scented woman to her feet, and she stayed motionless, regarding me. She had really wonderful eyes.
"You are evil," I said, "through and through you are evil, I think, and I can't help thinking you are a little crazy. But I wish you would teach me to be as you are, for tonight the hands of my dead father strain from his grave and clutch about my ankles. He has the right because it is his flesh I occupy. And I must occupy the body of a Townsend always. It is not quite the residence I would have chosen-- Eh, well, for all that, I am I! And at bottom I loathe you!"
"You love me!" she breathed.
I thrust her aside and paced the floor. "This is an affair of moment. I may not condescend to sell, as Faustus did, but of my own volition must I will to squander or preserve that which is really Robert Townsend."
I wheeled upon Gillian Hardress, and spoke henceforward with deliberation. You must remember I was very young as yet.
"I have often regretted that the colour element of vice is so oddly lacking in our life of to-day. We appear, one and all, to have been born at an advanced age and with ladylike manners, and we reach our years of indiscretion very slowly; and meanwhile we learn, too late, that prolonged adherence to morality trivialises the mind as hopelessly as a prolonged vice trivialises the countenance. I fear this has been said by someone else, my too impetuous Jill, and I hope not, for in that event I might possibly be speaking sensibly, and to be sensible is a terrible thing and almost as bad as being intelligible."
"You are not being very intelligible now, sweetheart. But I love to hear you talk."
"Meanwhile, I am young, and in youth--il faut des emotions, as Blanche Amory is reported to have said, by a novelist named Thackeray, whose productions are now read in public libraries. Still, for a respectable and brougham-supporting person, Thackeray came then as near to speaking the truth as is possible for people of that class. In youth emotions are necessary. Find me, therefore, a new emotion!"
"So many of them, dear!" she promised.
"I do not love you, understand,--and your husband is my friend, and I admire him. But I am I! I have endowments, certain faculties which many men are flattering enough to envy--and I will to make of them a carpet for your quite unworthy feet. I will to degrade all that in me is most estimable, and in return I demand a new emotion."
