He spoke to her hardly and coldly.
"You seem to me to choose to try a bit of everything and a bit of
everybody," he said. "That's your affair. But I'm not surprised that you
don't find it satisfactory."
"I have to try more than I like of some things and some people," she
replied. She went on quickly, "I know, oh, I know! Now you're calling me
disloyal!"
A curious vexation laid hold of him. Once he had liked her to speak of
him in this strain, even as once he had loved to see in her the type of
the pure, calm, gracious maiden. Now he knew better both her and himself.
The impulse was on him to say that he cared nothing for her disloyalty so
that he himself was the cause of it and he himself to reap the benefit.
He was quick to read her, and he read in her restless misery some sore
discontent with the lot that she had chosen. But he refrained from the
words, not in his turn from any loyalty, but rather still from
bitterness, from a perverse desire to give her nothing of what she had
refused, to leave her in the solitude of spirit which came of her own
action.
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