“What’s that got to do with you?” she demanded.
“It’s got everything to do with me,” he said.
“Well, you can go and find out!” she said.
It was girlish; it was childish; it was scarcely according to the canons for conducting a final rupture; but it was not the less tragically serious. Indeed, the spectacle of this young girl absurdly behaving like one, in a serious crisis, increased the tragicalness of the situation even if it did not heighten it. The idea that ran through Gerald’s brain was the ridiculous folly of having anything to do with young girls. He was quite blind to her beauty.
“‘Go’?” he repeated her word. “You mean that?”
“Of course I mean it,” she answered promptly.
The coward in him urged him to take advantage of her ignorant, helpless pride, and leave her at her word. He remembered the scene she had made at the pit shaft, and he said to himself that her charm was not worth her temper, and that he was a fool ever to have dreamed that it was, and that he would be doubly a fool now not to seize the opportunity of withdrawing from an insane enterprise.
“I am to go?” he asked, with a sneer.
She nodded.
“Of course if you order me to leave you, I must. Can I do anything for you?”