"It's a degradation."
He smiled. "Now that's melodrama, straight out of your worst English
plays. _And_ how bad they can be!... But you hadn't always this vehement
hatred. What's changed your mind?"
"I don't know that I _have_ changed my mind," I answered. "I think I've
always disliked you. But there at the Front and in the Forest you were
brave and extraordinarily competent. You treated Trenchard abominably,
of course--but he rather asked for it in some ways. Here you've been
nothing but the meanest skunk and sneak. You've set out deliberately to
poison the lives of some of the best-hearted and most helpless people on
this earth.... You deserve hanging, if any murderer ever did!"
He looked at me so mildly and with such genuine interest that I was
compelled to feel my indignation a whit melodramatic.
"If you are going," I said more calmly, "for Heaven's sake go! It
_can't_ be any pleasure to you, clever and talented as you are, to bait
such harmless people as Vera and Nicholas. You've done harm enough.
Leave them, and I forgive you everything."
"Ah, of course your forgiveness is of the first importance to me," he
said, with ironic gravity.
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