lightest."

He said patiently: "This is a public show; do you understand? Not one of
those private bench exhibitions."

"I understand. Really, Howard, you are insufferable at times."

"Do you feel that way?"

"Yes, I do. I am sorry to be rude, but I do feel that way!" Flushed,
impatient, she looked him squarely between his narrowing, woman's eyes:
"I do not care for you very much, Howard, and you know it. I am marrying
you with a perfectly sordid motive, and you know that, too. Therefore
it is more decent--if there is any decency left in either of us--to
interfere with one another as little as possible, unless you desire a
definite rupture. Do you?"

"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