The Fighting Chance

"I should advise you to chloroform me," she said defiantly. "You don't realise my accomplishments with the punching-bag."

"So you mean to resist?"

"Yes, I do. If I were going to surrender at once, I might as well go off to church with you now."

"Wenniston church!" he said promptly. "I'll order the Mercedes."

She laughed, lazily settling herself more snugly by the fire. "Suppose it were our fire?" she smiled. "There would be a dog lying across that rug, and a comfortable Angora tabby dozing by the fender, and--you, cross-legged, at my feet, with that fascinating head of yours tipped back against my knees."

The laughter in her voice died out, and he had risen, saying unsteadily: "Don't! I--I can't stand that sort of thing, you know."

She had made a mistake, too; she also had suddenly become aware of her own limits in the same direction.

"Forgive me, dear! I meant no mockery."

"I know. … After a while a man finds laughter difficult."

"I was not laughing at--anything. I was only pretending to be happy."

"Your happiness is before you," he said sullenly.

"My future, you mean. You know I am exchanging one for the other. … And some day you will awake to the infamy of it; you will comprehend the depravity of the monstrous trade I made. … And then--and then--"

She passed one slim hand over her face--"then you will shake yourself free from this dream of me; then, awake, my punishment at your hands will begin. … Dear, no man in his right senses can continue to love a girl such as I am. All that is true and ardent and generous in you has invested my physical attractiveness and my small intellect with a magic that cannot last, because it is magic; and you are the magician, enmeshed for the moment in the mists of your own enchantment. When this fades, when you unclose your eyes in clear daylight, dear, I dread to think what I shall appear to you--what a dreadful, shrunken, bloodless shell, hung with lace and scented, silken cerements--a jewelled mummy-case--a thing that never was! … Do you understand my punishment a little, now?"

"If it were true," he said in a dull voice, "you will have forgotten, too."

"I pray I may," she said under her breath.

And, after a long silence: "Do you think, before the year is out, that you might be granted enough courage?" he asked.

"No. I shall not even pray for it. I want what is offered me! I desire it so blindly that already it has become part of me. I tell you the poison is in every vein; there is nothing else but poison in me. I am what I tell you, to the core. It is past my own strength of will to stop me, now. If I am stopped, another must do it. My weakness for you, being a treachery if not confessed, I was obliged to confess, horribly frightened as I was. He might have stopped me; he did not. … And now, what is there on earth to halt me? Love cannot. Common decency and courage cannot. Fear of your unhappiness and mine cannot. No, even the certitude of your contempt, some day, is powerless to halt me now. I could not love; I am utterly incapable of loving you enough to balance the sacrifice. And that is final."