She lifted her head and looked up at him with dimmed eyes: 

“You were untrue to yourself, Louis—­to your own idea of truth.  And you were untrue to me.  And for the first time I look at you, ashamed and shamed.”

“Yes,” he said, very white.

“Why did you offer our love such an insult?” she asked.

He made no answer.

“Was it because, in your heart, you hold a girl lightly who promised to give herself to you for your own sake, renouncing the marriage vows?”

“No!  Good God—­”

“Then—­is it because you do not yet love me enough?  For I shall not give myself to you until you do.”

He hung his head.

“I think that is it,” she said, sorrowfully.

“No.  I’m no good,” he said.  “And that’s the truth, Valerie.”  A dark flush stained his face and he turned it away, sitting there in silence, his tense clasp tightening on the arms of the chair.  Then he said, still not meeting her eyes: 

“Whatever your beliefs are you practice them; you are true to your convictions, loyal to yourself.  I am only a miserable, rotten specimen of man who is true to nothing—­not even to himself.  I’m not worth your trouble, Valerie.”

“Louis!”

“Well, what am I?” he demanded in fierce disgust.  “I have told you that I believe in the conventions—­and I violate every one of them.  I’m a spectacle for gods and men!” His face was stern with self-disgust:  he forced himself to meet her gaze, wincing under it; but he went on: 

“I know well enough that I deserve your contempt; I’ve acquired plenty of self-contempt already.  But I do love you, God knows how or in what manner, but I love you, cur that I am—­and I respect you—­oh, more that you understand, Valerie.  And if I ask your mercy on such a man as I am, it is not because I deserve it.”

“My mercy, Louis?”

She rose to her knees and laid both hands on his shoulders.

“You are only a man, dear—­with all the lovable faults and sins and contradictions of one.  But there is no real depravity in you any more than there is in me.  Only—­I think you are a little more selfish than I am—­you lose self-command—­” she blushed—­“but that is because you are only a man after all....  I think, perhaps, that a girl’s love is different in many ways.  Dear, my love for you is perfectly honest.  You believe it, don’t you?  If for one moment I thought it was otherwise, I’d never let you see me again.  If I thought for one moment that anything spiritual was to be gained for us by denying that love to you or to myself—­or by living out life alone without you, I have the courage to do it.  Do you doubt it?”

“No,” he said.

She sighed, and her gaze passed from his and became remote for a moment, then: 

“I want to live my life with you,” she said, wistfully; “I want to be to you all that the woman you love could possibly be.  But to me, the giving of myself to you is to be, in my heart, a ceremony more solemn than any in the world—­and it is to be a rite at which my soul shall serve on its knees, Louis.”