He didn’t say, “You agreed to the other!” But I knew some men might. So I went on trying to explain to this specially obtuse one.
“Don’t you see how much easier it is to pretend to be engaged or even—in love with a person, than to turn round and like them because you’re asked to?”
“Is it?”
“But of course it is!” said I. “One can act being—engaged and all that. One can’t force oneself into friendship, real liking.” (Stupid, he was; it was just like his not seeing the difference between accepting furs—and a frock!) “One simply can’t make oneself like. That is asking too much. And I never bargained for it. It wasn’t——”
—“In the arrangement,” I nearly said.
I might just as well have said it! For:
“Damn—dash that infernal arrangement!” muttered my employer heatedly, crunching, in the absence of Cariad, the well-kept gravel beneath his heel. “Can’t you forget that, leave that alone for the time being? It would be so much easier——”
“Yes! For you perhaps!” I retorted. “But not easy for me; and it’s impossible for me to feel like being ‘friends’ to order!”
He said nothing for a minute. Then he began again quietly. “You mean you dislike me?”
“I don’t even know you well enough for really liking or disliking,” I argued coldly. “And besides, what have we—you and I—in common, that we should expect to get on well together?”