The Fighting Chance

"I? A--a rupture?"

"Yes," she said hotly; "do you?"

"Do you, Sylvia?"

"No; I'm too cowardly, too selfish, too treacherous to myself. No, I don't."

"Nor do I," he said, lifting his furtive eyes.

"Very well. You are more contemptible than I am, that is all."

Her voice had grown unsteady; an unreasoning rush of anger had set her whole body a-thrill, and the white heat of it was driving her to provoke him, as though that might cleanse her of the ignominy of the bargain--as though a bargain did not require two of the same mind to make it.

"What do you want of me?" she said, still stinging under the angry waves of self-contempt. "What are you marrying me for? Because, divided, we are likely to cut small figures in our tin-trumpet world? Because, united, we can dominate the brainless? Is there any other reason?"

Showing his teeth in that twitching snicker that contracted the muscles of his upper lip: "Children!" he said, looking at her.

She turned scarlet to her hair; the deliberate grossness stunned her. Confused, she stood confronting him, dumb under a retort the coarseness of which she had never dreamed him capable.

"I mean what I say," he repeated calmly. "A man cares for two things: his fortune, and the heirs to it. If you didn't know that you have learned it now. You hurt me deliberately. I told you a plain truth very bluntly. It is for you to consider the situation."

But she could not speak; anger, humiliation, shame, held her tongue-tied. The instinctive revolt at the vague horror--the monstrous, meaningless threat--nothing could force words from her to repudiate, to deny what he had dared to utter.

Except as the effrontery of brutality, except as a formless menace born of his anger, the reason he flung at her for his marrying her conveyed nothing to her in its grotesque impossibility. Only the intentional coarseness of it was to be endured--if she chose to endure it; for the rest was empty of concrete meaning to her.

Lent was half over before she saw him again. Neither he nor she had taken any steps to complete the rupture; and at the Mi-carême dance, given by the Siowa Hunt, Quarrier, who was M. F. H., took up the thread of their suspended intercourse as methodically and calmly as though it had never quivered to the breaking point. He led the cotillon with agreeable precision and impersonal accuracy, favouring her at intervals; and though she wasted no favours on him, she endured his, which was sufficient evidence that matters were still in statu quo.