"I have nothing to give you.

What you ask for is just as impossible as though you were to walk in your picture gallery and kneel before your great masterpiece and beg Beatrice herself to step down from the canvas.

I began to wonder yesterday," she went on, rising abruptly and moving across the room, "whether I really was that sort of woman.

With your money in my pocket and the gambling fever in my pulses, I began even to believe it.

And now I know that I am not.