“You think it that?” Perior was not sorry to tell her and himself what he did think.
“I think it just that. A phase of your varied existence; a curious experience to sound. You have set your heart on being in love with me—since that was an experience most amusingly improbable. I am another toy to grasp since the last disappointed.”
“You are dull,” said Camelia. She looked down, clasping her hands behind her. “You are not sincere. It pleases you to blind yourself with your preconceived idea of me. Your self-righteousness would not like to own itself mistaken in believing anything but the worst of me.”
“Ah! hasn’t it for years been struggling to see only the best of you!” cried Perior; “I don’t deserve that, Camelia.”
“You see the best now; why won’t you believe in it?”
“I don’t say I see the worst—by no means; even there is something that surprises me, that makes me confess, gladly, that I have misjudged you; but I can only believe that yesterday, in the impulsive reaction against your false position—you did not love Arthur—the fact frightened you; I am glad of that, too; but in the melting illusion you thought of me as something solid to cling to, and now you are determined to keep on clinging, deceiving yourself with an impossible mirage of fidelity, devotion, and self-forgetting, which you’ll never reach, Camelia —never, never.” Camelia contemplated him.
“Yes, you believed that, or something even less pathetic; that accounts for your cruelty—the cruelty of your last words yesterday—so false as I knew them; but I understood them, saw all you thought, though your wrath, your injury, your impatience to punish—how fond you are of punishing!—wouldn’t let me explain. You did not believe that I loved you—loved you. You do not believe it now. You can’t believe that I, who could have anybody, should choose you. It looks to you like an aberration. You are afraid of being hurt by believing, afraid I’ll treat you as I treated him, afraid that you will be another toy—that was what cut yesterday. You were being played with—I saw you thought it. But I do love you; you will have to believe it. I do—choose you.” Her head raised, she was looking at him with the clear command of this inflexible choice. The sublimity of confidence was touching. Perior, grimly conscious of its illusory foothold over chasms, could afford a certain chivalry, could at least restrain the brutality of a push into the void. He didn’t like the idea of Camelia, his smiling Camelia, really scared, tumbling from her pinnacles into the abyss where rocky facts awaited her.
“I am sensible to the compliment”—the mild irony of his tone was a warning of insecurity—“though you will own that it is, in some senses, a dubious one; but it’s very kind in you, who could have anybody, to stoop to a nobody. My obscurity is gilded by the preference; it will console, illuminate my solitude.” She flushed, interrupting him with a quick, sharp—
“I didn’t intend that! You know it! You are cruel, yes, and mean; for only my sincerity gives you the power to wound me. You are a somebody; though the whole world were blind, I can see; that is why I love you. Do you believe me when I tell you that I love you?” Camelia did not come closer as she asked it, but her poised expectancy of look seemed to claim him. Perior folded his arms and stared at her. “I would rather not,” he said.
“Why?”—her voice at last showed a tremor. “You debase me by your incredulity. If I do not love you—what did yesterday mean?—what does this mean? It is my only excuse.”