k a man in the face,
not even Churchill. I can never go to him again." I paused, expecting a
sign of softening. None came. "I have parted with my past and you tell
me there is no future."

"None," she echoed. Then, coldly, as a swan takes the water, she began
to speak:

"Well, yes! I've hurt you. You have suffered and in your pain you think
me vile, but remember that for ages the virtue of to-morrow has been the
vileness of to-day. That which outstrips one, one calls vile. My virtue
lies in gaining my end. Pity for you would have been a crime for me. You
have suffered. And then? What are you to me? As I came among you I am
to-day; that is where I am triumphant and virtuous. I have succeeded.
When I came here I came into a world of--of shadows of men. What were
their passions, their joys, their fears, their despair, their outcry, to
me? If I had ears, my virtue was to close them to the cries. There was
no other way. There was one of us--your friend Fox, I mean. He came into
the world, but had not the virtue to hold himself aloof. He has told
you, 'One goes blind down here.' He began to feel a little like the
people round him. He contracted likings and dislikings. He liked you ...
and you betrayed him. So he went under. He grew blind down here. I have
not grown blind. I see as I saw. I move as I did in a world of ... of
the pictures of men. They despair. I hear groans ... well, they are the
groans of the dead to me. This to you, down near it, is a mass of
tortuous intrigue; vile in its pettiest detail. But come further off;
stand beside me, and what does it look like? It is a mighty engine of
disintegration. It has crushed out a whole fabric, a whole plane of
society. It has done that. I guided it. I had to have my eyes on every
little strand of it; to be forever on the watch."

"And now I stand alone. Yesterday that fabric was everything to you; it
seemed solid enough. And where is it to-day? What is it to you more than
to me? There stood Virtue ... and Probity ... and all the things that
all those people stood for. Well, to-day they are gone; the very belief
in them is gone. Who will believe in them, now that it is proved that
their tools were people ... like de Mersch? And it was I that did it.
That, too, is to be accounted to me for virtue."

"Well, I have inherited the earth. I am the worm at the very heart of
the rose of it. You are thinking that all that I have gained is the hand
of Gurnard. But it is more than