“Oh, you—­you!  You don’t understand.  You aren’t capable of understanding.  You’re a block—­a machine—­you don’t feel—­you g-go about—­rolling over p-people and things like—­like a damned steam-roller.  You’re not a man at all.  You don’t love anyone—­not even yourself.  What do you know about anything?”

He was grotesque in his scorn, and yet Stonehouse, leaning with an apparent negligence against the mantel-shelf, felt himself go dead white under the attack.  He had lost Cosgrave.  And he knew now that he needed him desperately—­more now than even in his desolate childhood—­that unconsciously he had hugged the knowledge of that boyish affection and dependence to him with a secret pride as a talisman against he hardly knew what—­utter isolation, a terrifying hardness.  He made up his mind to have done now with reserve, to show before it was too late at least some of that dwarfed and suffocated feeling.  But he faltered over his first sentence.  He had trained himself too long and too carefully to speak with that cold, ironic inflexion.  He sounded in his own ears formal—­unconvincing.

“You’re wrong.  I do care.  I care for you.  You’re my friend.  I do understand, in part, at any rate.  I can prove it.  When I saw how unhappy you were I went to her—­I tried to reason with her.”

He broke off altogether under the amazed stare that greeted this statement.  The next instant Cosgrave had tossed his hands to heaven, shouting with a ribald laughter: 

“Oh, my Heaven—­you poor fish!  You think you can cure everything.  I can imagine what you said:  ’I suggest, Mademoiselle, that you reduce the doses gradually.’”

It was so nearly what he had said that Stonehouse flinched, and suddenly Cosgrave seemed to feel an impatient compassion for him.  “Oh, I’m a beast.  It was jolly decent of you.  You meant well.  But you can’t help.”

And that was what she had said.  Stonehouse made no answer.  He saw himself as ridiculous and futile.  He was sick with disgust at his own pain.  If he had lost Cosgrave he wanted to have done with the whole business now—­quickly and once and for all.

There was a sense of finality in the shabby room.  The invisible bond that had held them through eight years of separation and silence had given way.  It was almost a physical thing.  It checked and damped down Cosgrave’s excitement so that he said almost calmly: 

“Well, I shan’t attempt to see her again.  You’ll have that satisfaction.  I’ll get out of here—­back to my jolly old swamp, where there aren’t any beastly women—­decent or indecent—­only mosquitoes.”

He waited a moment, as though trying hard to finish on a warmer, more generous note.  Perhaps some faint flicker of recollection revived in him.  But it could only illuminate a horrifying indifference.  He went out without so much as a “good-night.”

The morning papers gave the Kensington House incident due prominence.  It was one more feather in Mademoiselle Labelle’s outrageous head-gear.  The Olympic had not so much as standing room for weeks after.