Page:The Inheritors, An Extravagant Story.djvu/207

 frost. It was like a pall, like descending clouds of smoke, seemed to be actually present in the absurdly lofty room—this belief in what she stood for, in what she said she stood for.

"I don't believe you," I proclaimed, "I won't . . . You are playing the fool with me . . . trying to get round me . . . to make me let you go on with these—with these—It is abominable. Think of what it means for me, what people are saying of me, and I am a decent man—You shall not. Do you understand, you shall not. It is unbearable . . . and you . . . you try to fool me . . . in order to keep me quiet . . ."

"Oh, no," she said. "Oh, no."

She had an accent that touched grief, as nearly as she could touch it. I remember it now, as one remembers these things. But then I passed it over. I was too much moved myself to notice it more than subconsciously, as one notices things past which one is whirled. And I was whirled past these things, in an ungovernable fury at the remembrance of what I had suffered, of what I had still to suffer. I was speaking with intense rage, jerking out words, ideas, as