"He would have the same chance as the others. No, it isn't that. He disapproves of me; I can feel it, as he looks at me through those dark, half-shut eyes of his, and it gives me an uncomfortable sense of wickedness. He thinks me flippant, and vain, and frivolous, and I am when he is there, or I seem so. When he is listening, I say all the horrid, cynical, heartless things I can think of. I have to say them, somehow. It is fate. It began the first night that I met him—it was in the country, do you remember?" She paused and again looked questioningly at Mrs. Bobby.
"Yes," the latter answered softly, "I remember."
"I was rather excited that night—it was the first time I had ever been out to dinner. I talked in a flippant sort of way about hating the country, and longing to go out, and wanting to be always amused. It was very young, I suppose." Elizabeth spoke with all the superiority of a girl half-way through her first season towards her more unsophisticated self of a few months before. "He didn't like it. The sort of woman whom he admires knows her catechism, and is satisfied with that situation in life where it has pleased Providence to place her. I shocked him; he has never got over it. He showed me, that very evening, how he disliked me—it was so pointed that it was almost rude. You asked me—do you remember? to play." She stopped.
"I remember," said Mrs. Bobby again softly. "I never heard you play so well."
"I never have—since. I seemed to have, just for the moment, some strange power over the keys—such feelings come to one, you know, sometimes. And then, when I stopped—he had asked me for the Fire-music—I felt, somehow, that he was fond of music—he is fond of it, passionately fond—but when I stopped, he looked at me blankly for a moment, till he suddenly remembered what was expected of him, and thanked me in a cold sort of way and walked off. And—I shouldn't think so much of that; but since then he has never—never once asked me to play, though he has often heard other people ask me."
"I have noticed," said Mrs. Bobby, quietly, "that you will never play when he is in the room."
"I couldn't," said Elizabeth, "it would have such a dampening effect to feel that there was one person in the room who disliked it, who, no matter how well I played, would always preserve his critical attitude.
"You see that I am reduced to the unflattering alternative that it is myself that he objects to or my playing. But it is the same with everything. There is my picture, for instance. He is the only person I know who has said nothing to me about it, has probably not even seen it."
"That must be rather a relief," said Mrs. Bobby, placidly, "since you are so tired of the subject."
"If I am," said Elizabeth, "that is no reason why he shouldn't go through the conventional formula of telling me that he has seen the picture, and adding something civil about it, as the most ordinary acquaintances never fail to do."