She slipped from him, and to her feet.
“Are you dreaming still?” she said. “Do you take me for her? We don’t do these things in our class.”
She had had her little revenge, and flushed triumphantly to it. It were supererogation to confess—what he did not know—that she was engaged in these matters to another. But, after all, the creature was a man, and his offence therefore nothing very terrible. Of course, if it had signified treachery to his blood-brother, that were another pair of shoes. But, inasmuch as only the betrayal of his fine lady-love was implied by it—why, the Marchioness di Rocco might very well profit by learning that her supposed pre-eminence in men’s hearts was at least open to challenge. A light sentence—as she considered it—was enough to meet this case.
She stood away, panting—a very ruffled little amourette, and thrice desirable in those plumes.
“I wouldn’t promise on my honour, if I was you, my good gentleman,” says she. “’Tisn’t much to trust on, when you can speak to me like that, and you sworn to another. I wonder what she’d think of it all. You’d best go to sleep, and get the better of yourself.”
He caught at her, the poor devil, as she was going, all his gauche libertinism snubbed out of him at a breath. The loss of his self-respect was nothing to this sudden realisation of his contemptible immaturity in vice, and of her recognition of it. There is no such crestfallen dog in all the world as your seducer held up to ridicule by his intended victim. He appealed to her abjectly:—
“Don’t go—don’t! I am so ill. I didn’t mean what—what you suppose. My brain is all on fire. He wouldn’t allow for that!”
“He? Who?” she demanded, withdrawing from him. He still pursued her with his hands, distraught, half frenzied:—
“You’re going to tell him, I know; and he so believes in me. It would be cruel, wicked, to shatter his faith. You ought to think of the demoralising effect on him—and—and I’m not myself, you know that perfectly well. I say and do things I had never thought of once.”
“Do you mean Mr Trix?” she said.