“I’m not. It’s you. You can no more put yourself in another person’s place——You can no more imagine how Coral feels——”
He looked at her, on that, with something of the despair with which she had looked at him.
“Look here, old girl,” he began, with heavy patience, “you mayn’t believe me, but honestly, if I’d had any idea you were so keen on Coral——”
“Coral? Coral? What do I care for Coral?” she asked him fiercely.
“But if you’re not upset about Coral,” demanded the logical sex, “what’s all the row about? What’s the matter with you?”
She turned away from him because she felt her lips were trembling.
“I don’t know,” she said weakly. “I don’t know.” And then—“I know I’m very unhappy.”
She trailed away to the window, without a glance, without, I give you my word, a glance at the new cabinet, though it half blocked her way.
He did not know whether he should laugh or be bored by her inexplicability. He was not in the habit of translating his sensations into thoughts, but what he really wanted was that she should stop talking and be smiling and interested in his interests, and be quick about it, so that he might legitimately dispense with his quite definite discomfort. Yet if, at that moment, she could have broken down completely, letting her trouble and her anxious love for him show itself in a storm of tears, I believe that she might have won him. He would have recognized tears: he would have understood tears: he would have done anything to comfort tears. Can’t you foresee his horrified distress? She might have said all her say and he would have listened. It was her chance, hers for the taking!
But she—she had learned so rigidly to repress herself in speech and still more in manner, that she found herself at such a moment not moved but frozen. She took it, with a sort of dreary triumph, as a sign that she had at last attained self-mastery, Justin’s virtue—not considering that a runaway engine and an engine that has jammed are equally beyond the driver’s control. And so—governed as ever by the Code, she told him that she was unhappy in the tone that she would have told him that her new shoes were tight. Yet she never dreamed that he took her flippancy at its face value—he—Justin—whose Adamry, with the deadly injustice of pure worship, she had endowed with omniscience. If Justin did not understand it was because he did not choose: and he did not choose because her emotion offended his inexorable taste. Thus, merciless to him as he to her, she reasoned, and for the first time in her life was bitter against him for the hardness of his heart. Yet, affected as she must always be by his each unconscious change of tone, how could she fail to respond when he laughed at this good joke of hers and, without admitting that he should or should not have written to Coral, put it to her, as a woman and a collector, that it was time to change the subject.