How entirely unlike it he thought her he found it difficult to refrain from saying in a way that might have startled her, touched as he was by the pathetically doubtful note in her speech.
"Of course you're not," he said. "I told you so. But I suppose everybody all round you was egging you on, and flattering you about it. You'd like to think you were pleasing people."
How understanding he was, in spite of the rough shocks his speeches sometimes brought with them! It really had been like that, at first.
"My darling old Daddy wasn't pleased at all," she said. "He hated it."
"Yes, I know he did. It's a great feather in his cap. Most fathers would have gone about purring. He was a good-looking fellow too, wasn't he? I never saw him myself, but my brother Geoffrey says he was."
This was a line she would rather have kept off of. "Yes, I suppose he was," she said judicially. "He was a lot older than me, and had seen a great deal of the world. Of course that flattered me. I don't think a younger man would have swept me off my feet as he did."
The Marquis de Lassigny had been thirty-six at the time of his quick wooing of Beatrix. Richard Mansergh was thirty-two, and had also seen a good deal of the world. This statement brought him pleasure.
"I see now," said Beatrix, speaking very calmly, "that I thought of him as possessing all sorts of qualities that weren't really his. Of course I thought I knew a great deal about men, as I had been out a whole season, and had seen so many of them. Now I see how little I really knew."
She was getting on very nicely, but his next words brought a check. "But you did love him," he said, uncompromisingly. "You wanted to give him everything that was in you."
How true that was she felt a pang in remembering. Whatever his love for her had been, hers had been for him the entire surrender of all she was or would be.