"You didn't suppose you were the first, did you?" he asked with brutal
candour. "Don't look at me like that. They were not like you, they came
to me willingly enough--too willingly. Allah! How they bored me! I
tired of them before they tired of me."
She flung her arm across her eyes with a dry sob, straining away from
him. She had never thought of that. In the purity of her mind it had
never occurred to her. She was only one of many, one of a succession of
mistresses, taken and discarded at his whim. She writhed with the shame
that filled her. "Oh, you hurt me!" she whispered very low, and then
anger killed all other feeling. He had loosened his arm about her and
she wrenched herself free and sprang to her feet. "I hate you, do you
understand? I hate you! I hate you!"
He lit a cigarette leisurely before answering and moved into a more
comfortable position on the divan. "So you have already told me this
afternoon," he said at length coolly, "and with reiteration your remark
becomes less convincing, ma cherie."
Her anger ebbed away. She was too tired to be angry. She was humiliated
and hurt, and the man before her had it in his power to hurt her more,
but she was at his mercy and to-night she could not fight. She pushed
the hair off her forehead with a heavy sigh and looked at the Sheik's
long length stretched out on the couch, the steely strength of his
limbs patent even in the indolent attitude in which he was lying, at
his brown handsome face, inscrutable as it always was to her, and the
feeling of helplessness came back with renewed force and with it the
sense of her own pitiful weakness against his force, compelling her to
speak. "Have you never felt pity for a thing that was weaker than
yourself? Have you never spared anything or any one in all your life?
Have you nothing in your nature but cruelty? Are all Arabs hard like
you?" she said shakily. "Has love never even made you merciful?"
He glanced up at her with a harsh laugh, and shook his head. "Love?
Connais pas! Yes, I do," he added with swift mockery, "I love my
horses."
"When you don't kill them," she retorted.
"I am corrected. When I don't kill them."
There was something in his voice that made her reckless, that made her
want to hurt him. "If you give no love to the--the women whom you bring
here, do you give love to the women of your harem? You have a harem, I
suppose, somewhere?" she braved him with curling lip and scornful
voice, but as she spoke she knew that she had only hurt herself and her
voice faltered.