"Because I love you, and because I am your slave. Elsie, how long is it to go on? I can't stand much more."
"It shall end to-night if you wish it," she answered.
"But how? But how?" he cried.
"In this way." She bent a little towards him and spoke very distinctly.
"I shall say to you, 'Mr. Hallett, I am very grateful to you for caring for me, and I am honoured by your affection!' That is how the nice girls talk in novels."
"Bah!" He gave his shoulders an impatient shake.
Elsie went on, "I am not worthy of your affection. I am a spoilt, heartless young woman, who has never loved anybody in her life—except Mammie and Ina—after a fashion. I don't think it is in me to love any man—unless he was the kind of man I have described—the kind of man who isn't at all likely to come my way. I am very selfish and very frivolous and very mercenary and very ambitious"
"No," he said doggedly; "I am not going to believe that."
"It is true though, all the same. The only thing that I care about is excitement. I should die of dullness in the Bush. I am nearly dead of dullness now. If I were a man I should fight battles; I should intrigue; I should do reckless things. As I am a woman, all I can do to amuse myself is to make men fall in love with me, and so gratify my sense of power, till" She paused.
"Go on—till when?"
"Till they want what I don't want to give—till they want to come close to me—and paw me—and all the rest."
"Elsie, you are horrid."
"Yes, I know that I am," she replied composedly. "But you know that you are all alike. You all want to paw me. Then I hate you. And what is worse, I hate myself."
"At any rate, you are frank enough."
"It is almost my only virtue, and as you say I make the most of it."
"Go on with the rest that you were going to say to me."
"I would say, 'And so, Mr. Hallett, being this sort of person, and being so wholly despicable and so utterly un-
