“What gives you such an idea?” Evan Pell asked, with interest.
“It’s a feeling—instinct, maybe. Possibly it’s because I’m trying to find something, and imagine it all. Maybe I’ve magnified little, inconsequential things.”
“What has all this to do with Abner Fownes?”
“Why—nothing. He seems to be a rather typical small-town magnate. He’s egotistical, bumptious, small-minded. He loves importance—and he’s rich. The professional politicians know him and his weaknesses and use him. He’s a figurehead—so far as actual things go, with a lot of petty power which he loves to exercise.... He’s a bubble, and, oh, how I’d love to prick him!”
Evan bowed to her with ironical deference. “Remarkable,” he said. “A clean-cut, searching analysis. Doubtless correct. You have been studying him cursorily for a matter of days, but you comprehend him to the innermost workings of his mind.... I, a trained observer, have watched and scrutinized Abner Fownes for a year—and have not yet reached a conclusion. May I compliment you, Miss Lee?”
Carmel’s eyes snapped. “You may,” she said, and then closed her lips determinedly.
“You were going to say?” Evan asked, in his most irritating, pedagogical tone.
“I was going to say that you have mighty little to be supercilious about. You don’t know any more about this man than I do, and you’ve been here a year. You don’t like him because he hurt your vanity, and you’re so crusted over with vanity that whatever is inside of it is quite lost to sight.... He had you discharged as superintendent of schools, and it rankles.... It’s childish, like that letter of yours.... Oh, you irritate me.”
“Er—at any rate you have the quality of making yourself clear,” he said, dryly, not offended, she was surprised to note, but rather amused and tolerant. He was so cocksure, so wrapped up in himself and his abilities, so egotistical, that no word of criticism could reach and wound him. Carmel wanted to wound him, to see him wince. She was sorry for him because she could perceive the smallness, the narrowness, the poverty of his life; yet, because she felt, somehow, that his character was of his own planning and constructing, and because it was so eminently satisfactory to her, that it was a duty to goad him into a realization of his deficiencies. Evan Pell did not seem to her a human being, a man, so much as a dry-as-dust mechanism—an irritating little pedant lacking in all moving emotions except boundless vanity.
She had taken him into the office, half from sympathy, half because somebody was needed and he was the only help available. At times she regretted it. Now she leaned forward to challenge him.