"Don't try to talk or to listen, dearest," said she in the sweet and soothing tone that is neither sweet nor soothing to a man in a certain species of unresponsive mood. "This air will do you good. It doesn't annoy you for me to talk to you, does it?"
The question was one of those which confidently expects, even demands, a sincere and strenuous negative for answer. It fretted him, this matter-of-course assumption of hers that she could not but be altogether pleasing, not to say enchanting to him. Her position, her wealth, the attentions she had received, the flatteries—In her circumstances could it be in human nature not to think extremely well of oneself? And he admitted that she had the right so to think. Still—For the first time she scraped upon his nerves. His reply, "Annoy me? The contrary," was distinctly crisp. To an experienced ear there would have sounded the faint warning under-note of sullenness.
But she, believing in his love and in herself, saw nothing, suspected nothing. "We know each other so thoroughly," she went on, "that we don't need to make any effort. How congenial we are! I always understand you. I feel such a sense of the perfect freedom and perfect frankness between us. Don't you?"
"You have wonderful intuitions," said he.
It was the time to alarm him by coldness, by capriciousness. But how could she know it? And she was in love—really in love—not with herself, not with love, but with him. Thus, she made the mistake of all true lovers in those difficult moments. She let him see how absolutely she was his. Nor did the spectacle of her sincerity, of her belief in his sincerity put him in any better humor with himself.
The walk was a mere matter of a dozen blocks. He thought it would never end. "You are sure you aren't ill?" she said, when they were at her door—a superb bronze door it was, opening into a house of the splendor that for the acclimated New Yorker quite conceals and more than compensates absence of individual taste. "You don't look ill. But you act queerly."
"I'm often this way when they drive me too hard down town."
She looked at him with fond admiration; he might have been better pleased had there not been in the look a suggestion of the possessive. "How they do need you! Father says—But I mustn't make you any vainer than you are."
He usually loved compliment, could take it in its rawest form with fine human gusto. Now, he did not care enough about that "father says" to rise to her obvious bait. "I'm horribly tired," he said. "Shall I see you to-morrow? No, I guess not—not for several days. You understand?"
"Perfectly," replied she. "I'll miss you dreadfully, but my father has trained me well. I know I mustn't be selfish—and tempt you to neglect things."