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Book, page 91 / 298 that she had been sitting by him here, talking so glibly, looking so straight into his eyes, flashing at him so many pretty gestures, it was the sense of tragic irony that prevailed in him -- that sense which had stirred in him, and been repressed, on the way from Judas. He knew that she was mak- ing her effect consciously for the other young men by whom the roof of the barge was now thronged. Him alone she seemed to observe. By her manner, she might have seemed to be making love to him. He envied the men she was so de- liberately making envious -- the men whom, in her undertone to him, she was really addressing. But he did take comfort in the irony. Though she used him as a stalking-horse, he, after all, was playing with her as a cat plays with a mouse. While she chattered on, without an inkling that he was no ordinary lover, and coaxing him to pre- sent two quite ordinary young men to her, he held ZULEIKA DOBSON 109 over her the revelation that he for love of her was about to die. And, while he drank in the radiance of her beauty, he heard her chattering on. "So you see," she was saying, "it couldn't do those young men any harm. Suppose unrequited love <i>is</i> anguish: isn't the discipline wholesome? Suppose I <i>am</i> a sort of furnace: shan't I purge, refine, temper? Those two boys are but scorched from here. That is horrid; and what good will it do them?" She laid a hand on his arm. "Cast them into the fur- nace for their own sake, dear Duke! Or cast one of them, or," she added, glancing round at the throng, "any one of these others!" "For their own sake?" he echoed, withdrawing his arm. "If you were not, as the whole world knows you to be, perfectly respectable, there
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