"Why do you say such things?" she cried. "You know they aren't true."
"When I said you 'always understand,' Kitty, I was wrong. You don't understand. No woman understands--that a man doesn't reform. A good man may have taken a wrong twist. And when he finds his way back to the straight road, they say he has 'reformed.' He hasn't. He's only struck his own natural gait again. As he was bound to. And _my_ kind of man sometimes takes a momentary twist in the _right_ direction. Then people say _he_ has reformed. And they are just as much mistaken as they were in the other case. For, water won't run uphill after the first pressure is withdrawn."
"The fires of affliction," he retorted sadly, "have burned away the dross from the pure gold of many a soul, I suppose. But no fires were ever heated that could burn dross fiercely enough to turn it into gold. Yet----"
He hesitated, then said, without daring to look at her:
"There's one thing I do want you to know, Kitty. Whatever I was and am, and whatever shams went to make up my daily life here--you know my love for _you_ was true and absolute and that I loved and _love_ you more than the whole world besides?"
"Yes," she returned, unembarrassed. "I believe that, Frederik. In part. You loved me as much as you could love any one. But----"
"Why must there be a 'but'?" he entreated.
"But," she went on with the relentlessness of the Young, "not as much as you loved yourself."
"More! Ten thousand times more!" he declared vehemently.
"No," she contradicted. "For you didn't love me enough to give me up when you knew I cared for another man. The Perfect Love would have----"
"The 'perfect love'!" he scoffed. "I have read of it. But I have yet to see it."
"You cannot see it," she replied, "for the same reason I could not see Oom Peter when he was fighting my battle here last night. My eyes were blinded by the world I live in. Perfect love is everywhere. It is within and about us. But----"
"But I would be too ignoble to recognise it if I chanced upon it? Perhaps. But why strip me of my last illusion? In the torment of my self-abasement this morning, I have clung to that one comfort: That I love you with a love which a truly worthless man _could_ not feel. And now----"