“Less unendurable,” she said with raillery. Then she added, “Less unendurable than profiting by a-creeping up in the dark.”
I thought I understood her better than she understood herself. And suddenly my passion melted in a tenderness I would have said was as foreign to me as rain to a desert. I noticed that she had a haggard look. “You are very tired, child,” said I. “Good night. I am a different man from what I was when I came in here.”
“And I a different woman,” said she, a beauty shining from her that was as far beyond her physical beauty as—as love is beyond passion.
“A nobler, better woman,” I exclaimed, kissing her hand.
She snatched it away.
“If you only knew!” she cried. “It seems to me, as I realize what sort of woman I am, that I am almost worthy of you!” And she blazed a look at me that left me rooted there, astounded.
But I went down the avenue with a light heart. “Just like a woman,” I was saying to myself cheerfully, “not to know her own mind.”
A few blocks, and I stopped and laughed outright—at Langdon's treachery, at my own credulity. “What an ass I've been making of myself!” said I to myself. And I could see myself as I really had been during those months of social struggling—an ass, braying and gamboling in a lion's skin—to impress the ladies!
“But not wholly to no purpose,” I reflected, again all in a glow at thought of Anita.