"Yes," she admitted. "But when I am with you I see everything exactly as you represent it."
"It's fortunate for you that I'm not disposed to take advantage of that—isn't it?" said he, with good-humored irony.
"You don't believe me!"
"Not altogether," he confessed. "To be quite candid, I think that for some reason or other I rouse in you an irresistible desire to pose. I doubt if you realize it—wholly. But you'd be hard pressed just where to draw the line between the sincere and the insincere, wouldn't you—honestly?"
She sat moodily combing at her horse's mane.
"I know it's cruel," he went on lightly, "to deny anything, however small, to a young lady who has always had her own way. But in self-defense I must do it."
"Why DO I take these things from you?" she cried, in sudden exasperation. And touching her horse with her stick, she was off at a gallop.
IX
From anger against Victor Dorn, Jane passed to anger against herself. This was soon followed by a mood of self-denunciation, by astonishment at the follies of which she had been guilty, by shame for them. She could not scoff or scorn herself out of the infatuation. But at least she could control herself against yielding to it. Recalling and reviewing all he had said, she—that is, her vanity—decided that the most important remark, the only really important remark, was his declaration of disbelief in her sincerity. "The reason he has repulsed me—and a very good reason it is—is that he thinks I am simply amusing myself. If he thought I was in earnest, he would act very differently. Very shrewd of him!"