Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/175

 'My God!' he cried, the perspiration making his greyed face ugly, 'not that. Oh, Lanice! You are merely concocting lies so as to make me go away and molest you no more. Come, I'll go away without your desecrating yourself to this sinful extent.'

He looked at her through sick, staring eyes.

'I'd rather die than believe your implications. No, no, I cannot.'

'But what if what you believe is the truth?'

'Like your mother. A hussy like your mother. My God! and all this time I have been looking up to you as one too holy to possess, even in wedlock, and you, you have squandered yourself on the first man to make improper advances to you.'

'Yes'—her voice was flat and hard—'he was, as you say, the first to love me and not offer marriage.'

Augustus flew into a difficult, heart-breaking rage. He mouthed at her, his hands, his lips shook, but without unison. His words fell like blows from dull weapons. Tears rolled unnoticed from his eyes. He was at once grotesque, pitiful, and terrible.

'If I am all that you say, beginning with a slut, and I'm sorry my vocabulary does not take me to the end, I cannot, of course, complain of your disgusting language. But...' and her voice broke—'I wish we might have parted friends.'

'Lanice, darling, darling, forgive me. It was not I that spoke so brutally. I could never speak so to you, my angel. Come. Let me protect you in the future from the lusts common to my own sex, protect you from a certain weakness one might expect from your