human
Dominic, she said breathlessly,
gpt
I have never known positively until now; but it was impossible that I should not have entertained suspicions.
human
Did he--you know who I mean--ever speak of me?
gpt
I think, Iglesias said,
human
You frightened him, Poppy rejoined.
gpt
I know one could do that. It was a last resource, a hateful one. Is there anything so difficult to forgive as being driven to be cruel? One was bound to be cruel in self-defence, or one would have been stifled, utterly degraded by self-contempt, bled to death not only in respect of money but of self-esteem.
human
Oh! the weak, the weak, she cried,
gpt
Look here, she said,
human
I don't want to whitewash myself. What I've done I've done. I don't pretend it's pretty or innocent, or that I haven't jolly well got to pay the price of it--though I think a good deal has been paid by now. But it seems to me my real crime was in marrying him, rather than in leaving him. It was a crime against love--love, which alone, if you've any real sense of the inherent decencies of things, makes marriage otherwise than an outrage upon a woman's pride and her virtue. But, then, one doesn't know all that when one's barely out of one's teens. And, you see, like a fool I took the first comer out of bravado, just that people mightn't see how awfully hard hit I was by his people interfering and preventing my marrying the poor, dear boy who gave me this --Poppy spread out the end of her dragon scarf--
gpt
I've told you about him.--Stage people are absurdly simple in some ways, you know. They live in such a world of pretences and fictions that they lose their sense of fact, or rather they never develop it. They're awfully easily taken in. Words go a tremendous long way with them. And de Courcy could talk. He was appallingly fluent, specially on the subject of himself. He made be believe he was rather wonderful, and I wanted to believe he was wonderful. I wanted to believe he was all the geniuses in creation rolled into one. All the more I wanted to believe it because I wasn't one scrap in love with him.
human
Do you see, do you see, do you see? she repeated.
gpt
Do you understand? I want you so badly to understand.
human
Do not be afraid, dear friend. I see with your eyes. I feel with your heart. As far as one human being can enter into and share the experience of another, I do understand.
gpt
But the nuisance is, she went on, the corners of her mouth taking a wicked twist,