He spoke in a constrained monotone, which seemed to Mary, in spite of her genuine regret for the pain she gave him, unreasonably full of reproach.

“Ah!” she cried sharply, “since I don’t love you, is not that a reason?  Oh, believe me,” she went on rather wearily, “I have no prejudice, not a grain.  I would sooner marry you than not.  Only I cannot bring myself to feel towards you as a woman ought to the man she marries.  Very likely I shall never marry.”

He considered her, half angrily, in silence, with his unanimated eyes; his dignity suffered in discomposure, and lacking this, pretentious as it was, he seemed to lack everything, becoming unimportant and absurd.

“Oh, you will marry!” he said at last sullenly, an assertion which Mary did not trouble to refute.

He returned the next minute, with a persistency which the girl began to find irritating, to his charge.

“I don’t understand it.  They seem to me wilful, unworthy of you, your reasons; it’s perverse—­yes, that is what it is, perverse!  You are not really happy here; the life doesn’t suit you.”

“What a discovery!” cried the girl half mockingly.  “I am not really happy!  Well, if I admit it?”

“I could make you so by taking you out of it.  You are too good for it all, too good to sit and pour out tea for—­for the sort of people who come here.”

“Do you mean,” she asked, with a touch of scorn in her voice, “that we are not respectable?”

“That is not you who speak,” he persisted; “it is your aunt who speaks through you.  I know it is the fashion now to cry out against one, even in good society, to call one straitlaced, if one respects certain conventions.  There are some I respect profoundly; and not the least that one which forbids right-minded gentlewomen to receive men of notoriously disgraceful lives.  One should draw the line; one should draw it at that Hungarian pianist who was here this afternoon.  Your aunt, of course, is a Frenchwoman; she has different ideas.  But you, I can’t believe that you care for this society, for people like Kronopolski and—­and Rainham.  Oh, it hurts me, and I imagine how distasteful it must be to you, that you must suffer these people.  I want to take you away from it all.”

The girl had risen, flushing a little.  She replied haughtily, with a vibration of passion in her voice: 

“You are not generous, Mr. Sylvester.  You are not even just.  What right have I ever given you to dictate to me whom I shall know or refuse to know?  I, too, have my convictions; and I think your view is narrow, and uncharitable, and false.  You see, we don’t agree enough....  Ah, let it end, Mr. Sylvester!” She went on more gently, but very tiredly, her pale face revealing how the interview had strained her:  “I wish you all the good in the world, but I can’t marry you.  Let us shake hands on that, and say good-bye.”

Sylvester had also risen to his feet, and he stood facing her for a moment indecisively, as though he hardly credited the finality of his rejection.