"Oh, I don't know what it means."
Her misery drove away his resentment, and pity filled its place.
"You seem more than usually down on your luck," he said with a smile.
"Yes, a little," she confessed. "It's the Mildmays and—and—the general sham of it, you know." She glanced across at him, smiling. "That's why I longed for you," she said.
It seemed to him that never had fate and never had woman been so cruel. The one so nearly had given what he wanted, the other tantalised with the exhibition of a feeling only just short of what he hoped for, but the more merciless because it seemed not to understand by how narrow an inch it failed of his desires. He spoke to her hardly and coldly.
"You seem to me to choose to try a bit of everything and a bit of everybody," he said. "That's your affair. But I'm not surprised that you don't find it satisfactory."
"I have to try more than I like of some things and some people," she replied. She went on quickly, "I know, oh, I know! Now you're calling me disloyal!"
A curious vexation laid hold of him. Once he had liked her to speak of him in this strain, even as once he had loved to see in her the type of the pure, calm, gracious maiden. Now he knew better both her and himself. The impulse was on him to say that he cared nothing for her disloyalty so that he himself was the cause of it and he himself to reap the benefit. He was quick to read her, and he read in her restless misery some sore discontent with the lot that she had chosen. But he refrained from the words, not in his turn from any loyalty, but rather still from bitterness, from a perverse desire to give her nothing of what she had refused, to leave her in the solitude of spirit which came of her own action. Besides his fastidiousness revolted from plunging him into a position which was so common, and which he, with his dislike of things common, had always counted vulgar. Thus he was silent, and she also sat silent, looking straight before her. At last, however, she spoke.
"Alexander's gone to the city," she said, "to see his stockbroker. The stockbroker's a cousin of—ours." She smiled for a moment. "His name's Mandeville. Since the party's out, we've got to see if we can make some money."
His pity revived; whatever she deserved, it was not this horrible common-place lot of wanting money; that sat so ill on his still stately, no longer faultless, image of her.