Roderick’s words seemed at first to Rowland like something heard in a dream; it was impossible they had been actually spoken—­so supreme an expression were they of the insolence of egotism.  Reality was never so consistent as that!  But Roderick sat there balancing his beautiful head, and the echoes of his strident accent still lingered along the half-muffled mountain-side.  Rowland suddenly felt that the cup of his chagrin was full to overflowing, and his long-gathered bitterness surged into the simple, wholesome passion of anger for wasted kindness.  But he spoke without violence, and Roderick was probably at first far from measuring the force that lay beneath his words.

“You are incredibly ungrateful,” he said.  “You are talking arrogant nonsense.  What do you know about my sensibilities and my imagination?  How do you know whether I have loved or suffered?  If I have held my tongue and not troubled you with my complaints, you find it the most natural thing in the world to put an ignoble construction on my silence.  I loved quite as well as you; indeed, I think I may say rather better.  I have been constant.  I have been willing to give more than I received.  I have not forsaken one mistress because I thought another more beautiful, nor given up the other and believed all manner of evil about her because I had not my way with her.  I have been a good friend to Christina Light, and it seems to me my friendship does her quite as much honor as your love!”

“Your love—­your suffering—­your silence—­your friendship!” cried Roderick.  “I declare I don’t understand!”

“I dare say not.  You are not used to understanding such things—­you are not used to hearing me talk of my feelings.  You are altogether too much taken up with your own.  Be as much so as you please; I have always respected your right.  Only when I have kept myself in durance on purpose to leave you an open field, don’t, by way of thanking me, come and call me an idiot.”

“Oh, you claim then that you have made sacrifices?”

“Several!  You have never suspected it?”

“If I had, do you suppose I would have allowed it?” cried Roderick.

“They were the sacrifices of friendship and they were easily made; only I don’t enjoy having them thrown back in my teeth.”

This was, under the circumstances, a sufficiently generous speech; but Roderick was not in the humor to take it generously.  “Come, be more definite,” he said.  “Let me know where it is the shoe has pinched.”

Rowland frowned; if Roderick would not take generosity, he should have full justice.  “It ’s a perpetual sacrifice,” he said, “to live with a perfect egotist.”

“I am an egotist?” cried Roderick.

“Did it never occur to you?”

“An egotist to whom you have made perpetual sacrifices?” He repeated the words in a singular tone; a tone that denoted neither exactly indignation nor incredulity, but (strange as it may seem) a sudden violent curiosity for news about himself.