“You do not believe me?” she asked.
“In my place, would you believe?” replied I. “You say I have taught you. Well, you have taught me, too—for instance, that the years you've spent on your knees in the musty temple of conventionality before false gods have made you—fit only for the Langdon sort of thing. You can't learn how to stand erect, and your eyes can not bear the light.”
“I am sorry,” she said slowly, hesitatingly, “that your faith in me died just when I might, perhaps, have justified it. Ours has been a pitiful series of misunderstandings.”
“A trap! A trap!” I was warning myself. “You've been a fool long enough, Blacklock.” And aloud I said: “Well, Anita, the series is ended now. There's no longer any occasion for our lying or posing to each other. Any arrangements your uncle's lawyers suggest will be made.”
I was bowing, to leave without shaking hands with her. But she would not have it so. “Please!” she said, stretching out her long, slender arm and offering me her hand.
What a devil possessed me that day! With every atom of me longing for her, I yet was able to take her hand and say, with a smile, that was, I doubt not, as mocking as my tone: “By all means let us be friends. And I trust you will not think me discourteous if I say that I shall feel safer in our friendship when we are both on neutral ground.”
As I was turning away, her look, my own heart, made me turn again. I caught her by the shoulders. I gazed into her eyes. “If I could only trust you, could only believe you!” I cried.
“You cared for me when I wasn't worth it,” she said. “Now that I am more like what you once imagined me, you do not care.”
Up between us rose Langdon's face—cynical, mocking, contemptuous. “Your heart is his! You told me so! Don't lie to me!” I exclaimed. And before she could reply, I was gone.
Out from under the spell of her presence, back among the tricksters and assassins, the traps and ambushes of Wall Street, I believed again; believed firmly the promptings of the devil that possessed me. “She would have given you a brief fool's paradise,” said that devil. “Then what a hideous awakening!” And I cursed the day when New York's insidious snobbishness had tempted my vanity into starting me on that degrading chase after “respectability.”