"Oh, how blind—how wickedly blind—how stupid—how selfish I have been!" Elizabeth exclaimed, after another pause in which to collect her shocked and bewildered faculties. "I never dreamt about it, my darling—never, for a single moment. I thought—I always had the settled impression that you did not like him."
"I don't like him," said Patty, fiercely, lifting herself up. "I love him—I love him! I must say it right out once, if I never speak another word," and she bent her head back a little, and stretched out her arms with an indescribable gesture as if she saw him standing before her. "He is a man—a real, true, strong man—who works, and thinks, and lives—lives! It is all serious with him, as I wanted it to be with me—and I might have been worthy of him! A little while ago we were so near to each other—so near that we almost touched—and now no two people could be farther apart. I have done him wrong—I have been a wicked fool, but I am punished for it out of all proportion. He flirt with a married woman! What could I have been dreaming of? Oh, how disgusting I must be to have allowed such an idea to come into my head! And yet it was only a little thing, Elizabeth, when you come to think of it relatively—the only time I ever really did him injustice, and it was only for a moment. No one can always do what is right and fair without making a mistake sometimes—it was just a mistake for want of thinking. But it has taken him from me as completely as if I had committed suicide, and was dead and buried and done with. It has made him hate me. No wonder! If he cared about me, I wouldn't be too proud to beg his pardon, but he doesn't—he doesn't! And so I must face it out, or else he will think I am running after him, and he will despise me more than he does already."
"But if he was doing no harm," said Elizabeth, soothingly, "he could not suppose that you thought he was."
"No," said Patty, "he will never think I was so disgusting as to think that of him. But it is as bad as if he did. That at least was a great, outrageous, downright wrong, worth fighting about, and not the pitiful shabby thing that it appears to him. For, of course, he thinks I did it because I was too grand to notice him while I was wearing a fine dress and swelling about with great people. It never occurred to me that it would be possible for him or anybody to suspect me of that," said Patty, proudly, drawing herself up; "but afterwards I saw that he could not help doing it. And ever since then it has been getting worse and worse—everything has seemed to point to its being so. Haven't you noticed? I never see him except I am with people who are above noticing him; and Mr. Smith—oh, what I have suffered from Mr. Smith to-night, Elizabeth!—has all this time been thinking I was going to marry him, and I can see now how it must have looked to other people as if I was. Just think of it!"—with a gesture of intense disgust. "As if any girl could stoop to that, after having had such a contrast before her eyes! No wonder he hates me and despises me—no wonder he looks at me as if I were the dirt beneath his feet. I wish I were," she added, with reckless passion; "oh, my dear love, I only wish I were!"
When she was about it, Patty cleansed her stuffed bosom thoroughly. It was not her way to do things by halves. She rhapsodised about her love and her lover with a wild extravagance that was proportionate to the strained reserve and restraint that she had so long put upon her emotions. After which came the inevitable reaction. The fit being over, she braced herself up again, and was twice as strong-minded and self-sufficient as before. When the morning came, and she and Elizabeth busied themselves with housework—Eleanor being relegated to the sofa with a sick headache—the girl who had dissolved herself in tears and given way to temporary insanity, as she chose herself to call it, so recently, was bright, and brusque, and cheerful, in spite of sultry weather; and not only did she pretend, even to her confidante, that the young man on the other side of the wall had no place in her thoughts, but she hardened her heart to adamant against him, for having been the cause of her humiliating lapse from dignity. It was quite a lucky chance, indeed, that she did not straightway go and accept the hand and fortune of Mr. Smith, by way of making reparation for the outrage committed vicariously by Paul Brion on her self-respect.
[CHAPTER XXX.]
THE OLD AND THE NEW.
The weather was scorchingly hot and a thunderstorm brewing when the girls sat down to their frugal lunch at mid-day. It was composed of bread and butter and pickled fish, for which, under the circumstances, they had not appetite enough. They trifled with the homely viands for awhile, in a manner quite unusual with them, in whatever state of the atmosphere; and then they said they would "make up" at tea time, if weather permitted, and cleared the table. Eleanor was sent to lie down in her room, Patty volunteered to read a pleasant novel to the invalid, and Elizabeth put on her bonnet to pay her promised visit to Mrs. Duff-Scott.
She found her friend in the cool music-room, standing by the piano, on which some loose white sheets were scattered. The major sat on a sofa, surveying the energetic woman with a sad and pensive smile.