"Do you think you could share my life?
Do you think you have?"
"I know what you mean," she said, flushing a little. "I daresay I've been
hard and--and didn't take the pains to understand, and was uncharitable
perhaps. Anyhow there'll be no opportunity for any more--any more
misunderstandings of that sort."
"No; the understanding's clear enough now," said he.
She looked at him almost despairingly; he seemed so strangely hostile, so
bitterly sensitive to her judgment of him.
"You think me," he went on, with his persistent eyes unwaveringly set on
her, "a not over-honest mountebank; that's what you and your friends
think me."
"Oh, I wish I'd never tried to talk to you about it!" she cried. "You
take hold of some hasty mood or look of mine and treat it as if it were
everything. You know it isn't."
"It's there, though."
"It never need be, never, never."
"You'll forget it all when we're settled down at--where was it?--Torquay
or somewhere--in our villa, like two old tabby-cats sitting in the sun?
No time to think it all over then? No, only all the hours of every day!"
He paused and then added in a low hard voice, "I'm damned if I'll do it.
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