Ramage; "hear me out! I'll have that satisfaction, anyhow.
You women, with your tricks of evasion, you're a sex of swindlers.
You have all the instinctive dexterity of parasites. You make yourself
charming for help. You climb by disappointing men. This lover of
yours--"

"He doesn't know!" cried Ann Veronica.

"Well, you know."

Ann Veronica could have wept with vexation. Indeed, a note of weeping
broke her voice for a moment as she burst out, "You know as well as I do
that money was a loan!"

"Loan!"

"You yourself called it a loan!"

"Euphuism. We both understood that."

"You shall have every penny of it back."

"I'll frame it--when I get it."

"I'll pay you if I have to work at shirt-making at threepence an hour."

"You'll never pay me. You think you will. It's your way of glossing over
the ethical position. It's the sort of way a woman always does gloss
over her ethical positions. You're all dependents--all of you. By
instinct. Only you good ones--shirk. You shirk a straightforward and
decent return for what you get from us--taking refuge in purity and
delicacy and such-like when it comes to payment."

"Mr. Ramage," said Ann Veronica, "I want to go--NOW!"

Part 5

But she did not get away just then.

Ramage's bitterness passed as abruptly as his aggression. "Oh,
Ann Veronica!" he cried, "I cannot let you go like this! You don't
understand. You can't possibly understand!"

He began a confused explanation, a perplexing contradictory apology for
his urgency and wrath. He loved Ann Veronica, he said; he was so mad
to have her that he defeated himself, and did crude and alarming and
senseless things. His vicious abusiveness vanished. He suddenly became
eloquent and plausible. He did make her perceive something of the acute,
tormenting desire for her that had arisen in him and possessed him.
She stood, as it were, directed doorward, with her eyes watching every
movement, listening to him, repelled by him and yet dimly understanding.

At any rate he made it very clear that night that there was an
ineradicable discord in life, a jarring something that must shatter all
her dreams of a way of living for women that would enable them to be
free and spacious and friendly with men, and that was the passionate
predisposition of men to believe that the love of women can be earned
and won and controlled and compelled.

He flung aside all his talk of help and disinterested friendship as
though it had neve