“What were you, then?” she said. “Not anyhow yourself, as I thought I had come to know you.”
“Familiarity, young lady, sometimes breeds contempt. Let me hear this fancy portrait described, before I admit or reject it.”
“Why, philosophically just and forbearing; always ready to make allowances; humorously tolerant of the weaknesses of smaller natures.”
“I acknowledge the soft impeachment with a smirk. And now, how have I falsified your too generous estimate of me? Did I upbraid you for your ill-manners towards my friends, whose only offence lay in wishing to make your undesirable acquaintance? On the contrary, I expressed concern for the situation in which your own obstinacy placed you. Did I not make allowances? Assuredly I did, even to the extent of bearing on your behalf, as some slight amelioration of your discourtesy, an imaginary message from yourself to the ladies. Finally, what humorous tolerance was lacking in my reference to your devoted henchman, whose constancy I acclaim as a thing for admiration, while I cannot, of course, through my baser nature, hope to emulate it? I trust only—to return your kind enquiries—that it proved a source of as great gratification to you to-day as I am bound to confess my inconstancy did to me.”
Though she took unresisting my merciless chastisement, I would not spare her one sting of it. There was something more behind my virulence, you will understand, than mere resentment of a piece of bad-temper, or even of bad taste. But there was yet a stronger incentive: I must be either resolutely brutal, I felt, or irresolutely weak. One concession to the emotional, which fought in me to grant pity and forgiveness to this soft tragic young sinner, and the end for us would come in sure disaster. Yet the tears in her eyes as she gazed at me, with the expression of one who is realising for the first time the truth of a hopelessly alienated affection, were advocates I had a mortal struggle to resist. Let the fact that I did resist them stand at least to my credit.
“I dare say you are justified,” she said, with a brave effort at self-control, “in speaking to me like that. I don’t defend myself, but only my opinion of you, which, being what it was, was the reason perhaps of my venturing to take such spoilt advantage of it. I won’t believe now that you are different from what I thought; I have tried you beyond your patience, that is all. But I think, Felix, you might have spared me all that bitter sarcasm. To use sarcasm, I have heard you say yourself, is to try to play the wit with a fool’s weapon. It hurts but it does not convince. I would much rather you told me straight out that you had had enough of my tempers and moods, and wanted to be rid of me.”
“I could not say that with truth, Fifine.”
“O, Felix! how are we to go on like this? Will it change your feelings to me at all to be told that I have been miserable, deservedly I know, all day?”
“What, in spite of your confident dependence on——”
“I have not been with him—I would not go, though he asked me. Most of the day I have spent in my bedroom.”