“What do you mean?” he asked.
“You are amusing,” she replied. “Your expression of gratitude was overacted. It was—was—grotesque.”
He drew back as if he had received a blow. “You are cruel,” he said.
“Because I warn you that you are overestimating my vanity? It seems to me, that is friendly kindness. I’m helping you on.”
“I do not know anything about your vanity. But I do know how I feel toward you—what every word from you means to me.”
There was wonder and some haughtiness in her steady gaze, as she said: “I do not understand you at all. Your words are the words of an extravagant but not very adroit flatterer. Your looks are the looks of a man without knowledge of the world and without a sense of proportion.”
“Why?”
She thought a moment, then turned toward him with her frank, direct expression. “I have been going about in your parish for several days now. And everywhere I have heard of you. Your helpers and those that are helped all talk of you as if you were a sort of god. You are their god. They draw their inspiration, their courage, their motive-power from you. They work, they strive, because they wish to win your praise.”
“I have been here fifteen years,” he explained with unaffected modesty, “and as I am at the head, naturally everything seems to come from me. In reality I do little.”
“That is not to my point. I wasn’t trying to compliment you. What I mean is that I find you are a man of influence and power in this community. And you must be conscious of this power. And since you evidently wield it well, you have it by right of merit. Yet you wish me to believe that you bow down in this humble fashion before a woman of whom you know nothing.” She laughed.