“About Meredith, your dress, or you?”
“About yourself, if you please.”
“It has seemed to me, Hilda, that you were even less interested in me than you were in yourself.”
Hilda looked round at him quickly, and he felt that his eyes held hers with a force which almost compelled her—
“No; I am very much interested in you.” Odd was silent, studying her face with much the same expression that he had studied her gown—the expression of painfully controlled emotion.
“There is nothing comparably interesting in me,” he said; “I have had my story, or at least I have missed my chance to have a story.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I mean that I might have made a mark in the world and didn’t.”
“And your books?”
“They are as negative as I am.”