shall not experiment on me any more. Go to your Grace if you want a
victim. She'll be a tough one.

CHARTERIS (reproachfully sitting down beside her). And you drove me to
propose to her to escape from you! Suppose she had accepted me, where
should I be now?

JULIA. Where _I_ am, I suppose, now that I have accepted Paramore.

CHARTERIS. But I should have made Grace unhappy. (Julia sneers).
However, now I come to think of it, you'll make Paramore unhappy. And
yet if you refused him he would be in despair. Poor devil!

JULIA (her temper flashing up for a moment again). He is a better man
than you.

CHARTERIS (humbly). I grant you that, my dear.

JULIA (impetuously). Don't call me your dear. And what do you mean by
saying that I shall make him unhappy? Am I not good enough for him?

CHARTERIS (dubiously). Well, that depends on what you mean by good
enough.

JULIA (earnestly). You might have made me good if you had chosen to.
You had a great power over me. I was like a child in your hands; and
you knew it.

CHARTERIS (with comic acquiescence). Yes, my dear. That means that
whenever you got jealous and flew into a violent rage, I could always