“What did you think, then?” Eppie asked.
He had to give her the helpless answer. “That you had accepted him.”
He knew, now, that she hadn’t, and that for him to have thought so was to have cruelly wronged her; and she took it in a long silence, as though she must give herself time to see it clearly, to adjust herself to it and to all that it meant—in him, for her.
What it meant, in her and for him, was filling his thoughts with a dizzy enough whirl of readjustment, and there mingled with it a strange after-flavor of the jealousy, and of the resentment against her; for, after all, though he had probably now an added reason for considering himself a warped wretch, there had been some reason for his mistake: if she hadn’t accepted him, why had he seen her so?
“Jim is gone,” she said at last.
“Because—It was unwillingly, then?”
The full flame of her scorn blazed out at that, but he felt, like an echo of tears in himself, that she would have burst into tears of wretchedness if she had not been able so to scorn him.
“Unwillingly! Why should you think him insolent and me helpless? Can you conceive of nothing noble?” she said.
“I am sorry, Eppie. I have been stupid.”
“You have—more than stupid. He was going and he asked me for that. And I gave it—proudly.”