“No; I did not wonder,” said Miss Latimer. “I know that young women nowadays have friendships like that. I knew that you had been Malcolm’s friend.”
“You did not see that it was more than friendship till last night?”
She paused, but only for a moment. “I saw that you were in love with her from the first.”
“But only last night saw that we were in love with each other?”
Again she did not reply. Turning her head slightly aside, as if in distaste for the intimacies he forced upon her, she took up the tea-pot and, still with that slightly, incessantly, shaking hand, poured herself out a second cup of tea.
He would not pause for her distaste. “I am afraid you dislike it very much.”
To this she replied, “I dislike anything that makes Antonia unhappy.”
He owned that it was a good answer. Leaning back in the divan, his foot crossed over his knee, his hand holding his ankle, he contemplated his antagonist. “My point is that it wouldn’t make her unhappy if she came away,” he took up. “If she came away and married me at once. It’s the place and its associations that have got upon her nerves.—How much you saw last night!”
She had poured out the cup and she raised it automatically to her lips while he spoke. Then, untasted, she set it down, and then, with the effect of a pale, sudden glare, her eyes were at last upon him.
“I do not know what you mean by nerves. Antonia is not as light as you imagine,” she said. “She loved her husband. She does not find it easy to forget him here, it is true; but I do not think she would find it easy if she left his home with another man.”