“You hit it off pretty well when you said that all I really cared for was money and jewels and my dancing and the big audiences and all that.”  Her eyes had narrowed so that the gleaming light that shone through her lashes was like a mere line of fire.  “You see, I got to play the game.  I got to.  Nothing but winning and winning big ever’s going to suit me.  I saw that when I was awful young.  I sort of looked out on life and it seemed to me that most people spent their lives like flies, flying around a while without any purpose, trying to buzz in the sun if they could, and by and by dropping off the window pane.”

“Nothing but winning will suit you,” he said drearily.  “You are only repeating what I told you.”  All the life, the passion had gone out of his voice.  “And I’m no prize, heaven knows!”

“I ain’t through yet,” she said.  “I never did talk much.  I guess I’m going to talk more to-night than I ever talked in my life, but I always saw everything that was going on around me, and it didn’t take me long to make out that all you’ll get in life is a kick and a crust if you haven’t got some kind of power in your hands.”

“God, you’re hard, hard as iron!” The room rang with the echoes of his mirthless laughter.  “Five, three minutes ago, you were in my arms, soft, yielding, trembling, giving me back kiss for kiss, and now you sit there expounding your merciless philosophy.”

“It ain’t me that’s merciless,” she returned, apparently unmoved, “it’s life.  You think my dancing’s great, so does everybody; so it is.  Well, it didn’t grow.  I made it.”  Here she lifted her head with pride, and folded her arms on her chest.  “Maybe you don’t think it took some training.  Maybe you don’t think it took some will and grit when I was a little kid to keep right on at my exercises when I ached so bad that the tears would run down my cheeks all the time I was at them.  My mother knew that you had to begin young and keep at ’em all the time, but mom never would have had the nerve to keep me to it.  She used often to cry with me.

“When I was a girl I’d liked to have had a good time, just in that careless way like other girls, but I gave that up, too, so’s I could work at my dancing.  When I’d get tired and blue I’d look at the stones I’d begun to collect with the money I’d earned.  I’m hard, yes, I guess you’re right.  I guess you got to have a streak of hardness in you to be one of the biggest dancers in the world, or to be the biggest anything, but”—­here she ran across the room and was down on her knees beside his chair—­“I’m not hard any longer.  Those jewels there,” pointing to the table behind her, “they don’t mean a thing to me any longer, nor my dancing, either, nor money, nor applause, nor anything in the world but you.”

He shrank away from her as if he feared the subduing magnetism of her touch.  “The useless cog to drop away when you get tired of him!  I told you your life was all rounded and complete.”