personality--ah yes, I can acknowledge all now. You had great
cleverness, gifts that startled and delighted; but yet I felt
always, and that feeling grew and grew, that there was nothing in
you wholly honest, that by artifice you had frittered away what
once may have been good in you. Now all goodness in you was an
accident of sense and caprice, not true morality."

"What has true morality to do with love of you?" he said.

"You ask me hard questions," she replied. "This it has to do
with it: We go from morality to higher things, not from higher
things to morality. Pure love is a high thing; yours was not high.
To have put my life in your hands--ah no, no! And so I fought you.
There was no question of yourself and Robert Moray--none. Him I
knew to possess fewer gifts, but I knew him also to be what you
could never be. I never measured him against you. What was his was
all of me worth the having, and was given always; there was no
change. What was yours was given only when in your presence, and
then with hatred of myself and you--given to some baleful
fascination in you. For a time, the more I struggled against it
the more it grew, for there was nothing that could influence
a woman which you did not do. Monsieur, if you had had Robert
Moray's character and your own gifts, I could--monsieur, I could
have worshiped you!"

Doltaire was in a kind of dream. He was sitting now in the
high-backed chair, his mouth and chin in his hand, his elbow resting
on the chair-arm. His left hand grasped the other arm, and he leaned
forward with brows bent and his eyes fixed on her intently. It was a
figure singularly absorbed, lost in study of some deep theme. Once