“What have you done?  It’s what you are doing that matters!  Giving way to temper and making me uncomfortable!  Do you call that ’love’?”

She dropped her hand from his arm and drew herself away from him.  She was trembling from head to foot.

“Please—­please don’t misunderstand me!” she stammered, like a frightened child—­“I—­I have no temper!  I—­I—­feel nothing—­I only want to please you—­to know what you wish—­”

She broke off—­her eyes, lifted to his, had a strange, wild stare, but he was too absorbed in his own particular and personal difficulty to notice this.  He went on, speaking rapidly—­

“If you want to please me you will first of all be perfectly normal,” he said—­“Make up your mind to be calm and good-natured.  I cannot stand an emotional woman all tantrums and tears.  I like good sense and good manners.  You ought to have both, with all the books you have read—­”

She gave a sudden low laugh, empty of mirth.

“Books!” she echoed—­and raising her arms above her head she let them drop again at her sides with a gesture of utter abandonment.  “Ah yes!  Books!  Books by the Sieur Amadis de Jocelin!”

Her hair was ruffled and fell about her face,—­her cheeks had flamed into a feverish red.  The tragic beauty of her expression annoyed him.

“Your hair is coming down,” he said, with a coldly critical smile —­“You look like a Bacchante!”

She paid no attention to this remark.  She was apparently talking to herself.

“Books!” she said again—­“Such sweet love-letters and poems by the Sieur Amadis de Jocelin!”

He grew impatient.

“You’re a silly child!” he said—­“Are you going to listen to me or not?”

She gazed at him with an almost awful directness.

“I am listening!” she answered.

“Well, don’t be melodramatic while you listen!” he retorted—­“Be normal!”

She was silent, still gazing fixedly at him.

He turned his eyes away, and taking up one of his brushes, dipped it in colour and made a great pretence of working in a bit of sky on his canvas.

“You see, dear child,” he resumed, with an unctuous air of patient kindness—­“your ideas of love and mine are totally different.  You want to live in a paradise of romance and tenderness—­I want nothing of the sort.  Of course, with a sweet caressable creature like you it’s very pleasant to indulge in a little folly for a time,—­and we’ve had quite four months of the ‘divine rapture’ as the poets call it,—­four months is a long time for any rapture to last!  You have—­yes!—­you have amused me!—­and I’ve made you happy—­given you something to think about besides scribbling and publishing—­yes—­I’m sure I have made you happy—­and,—­what is much more to my credit—­I have taken care of you and left you unharmed.  Think of that!  Day after day I have had you here entirely in my power!—­and yet—­and yet”—­here he turned his cold blue eyes upon her with an under-gleam of mockery in their steely light—­“you are still—­Innocent!”