’I wish you not to speak of it.  I don’t want to think of that horrible scene.’

’If you knew how lonely I was and how unhappy, you would have a little mercy.’

His voice was strangely moved.  She could not doubt now that he was sincere.

’You think me a charlatan because I aim at things that are unknown to you.  You won’t try to understand.  You won’t give me any credit for striving with all my soul to a very great end.’

She made no reply, and for a time there was silence.  His voice was different now and curiously seductive.

’You look upon me with disgust and scorn.  You almost persuaded yourself to let me die in the street rather than stretch out to me a helping hand.  And if you hadn’t been merciful then, almost against your will, I should have died.’

‘It can make no difference to you how I regard you,’ she whispered.

She did not know why his soft, low tones mysteriously wrung her heartstrings.  Her pulse began to beat more quickly.

’It makes all the difference in the world.  It is horrible to think of your contempt.  I feel your goodness and your purity.  I can hardly bear my own unworthiness.  You turn your eyes away from me as though I were unclean.’

She turned her chair a little and looked at him.  She was astonished at the change in his appearance.  His hideous obesity seemed no longer repellent, for his eyes wore a new expression; they were incredibly tender now, and they were moist with tears.  His mouth was tortured by a passionate distress.  Margaret had never seen so much unhappiness on a man’s face, and an overwhelming remorse seized her.

‘I don’t want to be unkind to you,’ she said.

‘I will go.  That is how I can best repay you for what you have done.’

The words were so bitter, so humiliated, that the colour rose to her cheeks.

‘I ask you to stay.  But let us talk of other things.’

For a moment he kept silence.  He seemed no longer to see Margaret, and she watched him thoughtfully.  His eyes rested on a print of La Gioconda which hung on the wall.  Suddenly he began to speak.  He recited the honeyed words with which Walter Pater expressed his admiration for that consummate picture.

’Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come, and the eyelids are a little weary.  It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.  Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed.  All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the Middle Ages, with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias.’