Silence again, as he wondered whether her remark was a chance shot or a subtle way of informing him that, if he were thinking of her as a woman and a possibility, he was wasting energy. "What I wished to say," he finally ventured, "was that I had the right to expect you to accept me for what I am to you. You cannot judge of what I may or may not have been to anyone else, of what others may or may not have been to me."
"What you are to me," replied she earnestly, "I've no right, or wish, to go beyond that."
"And," pursued he with some raillery, "don't forget we should be grateful for all varieties of human nature—the valleys that make the peaks, the peaks that make the abysses. What a world for suicide it would be, if human nature were one vast prairie and life one long Sunday in Battle Field.... What did you hear about me?"
"Nothing that interested me."
"Really?" He could not help showing pique.
"Nothing that would have changed me, if I had believed."
"I warned you it might be true," he interrupted.
"True or false, it was not part of the Boris Raphael I admire and respect."
He shifted his eyes, colored, was silenced. He did not like her frank friendliness; he did not want her respect, or the sort of admiration that goes with respect. But he somehow felt cheap and mean and ashamed before her, had a highly uncomfortable sense of being an inferior before a superior. He was glad to drop the subject. "At least," reflected he, "the longer the delay, the richer the prize. She was meant for some man. And what other has my chance?"
And, meanwhile, following his instinct and his custom, he showed her of his all-sided nature only what he thought she would like to see; time enough to be what he wished, when he should have got her where he wished—a re-creation for the gratification of as many sides of him as she had, or developed, capacity to delight.