Julia.  I don’t care.  It rests with you.  I am ready to go if she will give you up:  until then I stay.  Those are my terms:  you owe me that, (She sits down determinedly.  Charteris looks at her for a moment; then, making up his mind, goes resolutely to the couch, sits down near the right hand end of it, she being at the left; and says with biting emphasis)—­

Charteris.  I owe you just exactly nothing.

Julia (reproachfully).  Nothing!  You can look me in the face and say that?  Oh, Leonard!

Charteris.  Let me remind you, Julia, that when first we became acquainted, the position you took up was that of a woman of advanced views.

Julia.  That should have made you respect me the more.

Charteris (placably).  So it did, my dear.  But that is not the point.  As a woman of advanced views, you were determined to be free.  You regarded marriage as a degrading bargain, by which a woman sold herself to a man for the social status of a wife and the right to be supported and pensioned in old age out of his income.  That’s the advanced view—­our view.  Besides, if you had married me, I might have turned out a drunkard, a criminal, an imbecile, a horror to you; and you couldn’t have released yourself.  Too big a risk, you see.  That’s the rational view—­our view.  Accordingly, you reserved the right to leave me at any time if you found our companionship incompatible with—­what was the expression you used?—­with your full development as a human being:  I think that was how you put the Ibsenist view—­our view.  So I had to be content with a charming philander, which taught me a great deal, and brought me some hours of exquisite happiness.

Julia.  Leonard:  you confess then that you owe me something?

Charteris (haughtily).  No:  what I received, I paid.  Did you learn nothing from me?—­was there no delight for you in our friendship?

Julia (vehemently and movingly; for she is now sincere).  No.  You made me pay dearly for every moment of happiness.  You revenged yourself on me for the humiliation of being the slave of your passion for me.  I was never sure of you for a moment.  I trembled whenever a letter came from you, lest it should contain some stab for me.  I dreaded your visits almost as much as I longed for them.  I was your plaything, not your companion. (She rises, exclaiming) Oh, there was such suffering in my happiness that I hardly knew joy from pain. (She sinks on the piano stool, and adds, as she buries her face in her hands and turns away from him) Better for me if I had never met you!

Charteris (rising indignantly).  You ungenerous wretch!  Is this your gratitude for the way I have just been flattering you?  What have I not endured from you—­endured with angelic patience?  Did I not find out, before our friendship was a fortnight old, that all your advanced views were merely a fashion picked up and followed like any other fashion, without understanding or meaning a word of them?  Did you not, in spite of your care for your own liberty, set up claims on me compared to which the claims of the most jealous wife would have been trifles.  Have I a single woman friend whom you have not abused as old, ugly, vicious—­