It was as though the malevolent devil and the tortured soul had suddenly changed places.
When the man could speak, he reviled her, in his rasping whisper, with curses that it seemed must blister his tongue.

She received his effort with jeering laughter and taunting words; moving her body, now and then, among the cushions, with an air of purely physical enjoyment that, to the other, was maddening.
"If this is all you came for,"-- she said, easily,--"might have spared yourself the effort--don't you think ?" Controlling himself, in a measure, he returned, "I came to tell you that your intimacy with that damned painter must stop." Her eyes narrowed slightly.

One hand, hidden in the cushions, clenched until her rings hurt.

"Just what do you mean by my intimacy ?" she asked evenly.
"You know what I mean," he replied coarsely.

"I mean what intimacy with a man always means to a woman like you." "The only meaning that a creature of your foul mind can understand," she retorted smoothly.