"Are you content with them?"
"I think so. I have been examining myself, and honestly I think so," says she a little feverishly.
"Well, I'm not," returns he with decision. "You must give me credit for a great private store of amiability, if you imagine that I am satisfied to take things as they now exist—between you and me!"
"You have your faults, you see, as well as another," says she with a frown. "You are persistent! And the worst of it is that you are generally right." She frowns again, but even while frowning glances sideways from under her long lashes with an expression hardly uncivil. "That is the worst crime in the calendar. Be wrong sometimes, an' you love me, it will gain you a world of friends."
"If it could gain me your love in return, I might risk it," says he boldly. "But that is hopeless I'm afraid," shaking his head. "I am too often in the wrong not to know that neither my many frailties nor my few virtues can ever purchase for me the only good thing on which my soul is set."
"I have told you of one fault, now hear another," says she capriciously. "You are too earnest! What," turning upon him passionately, as if a little ashamed of her treatment of him, "is the use of being earnest? Who cares? Who looks on, who gives one moment to the guessing of the meaning that lies beneath? To be in earnest in this life is merely to be mad. Pretend, laugh, jest, do anything, but be what you really are, and you will probably get through the world in a manner, if not satisfactory to yourself, at all events to 'les autres.'"
"You preach a crusade against yourself," says he gently. "You preach against your own conscience. You are the least deceptive person I know. Were you to follow in the track you lay out for others, the cruelty of it would kill you.
"To your own self be true, And——"
"Yes, yes; I know it all," says she, interrupting him with some irritation. "I wish you knew how—how unpleasant you can be. As I tell you, you are always right. That last dance—it is true—I didn't want to have anything to do with it; but for all that I didn't wish to be told so. I merely suggested it as a means of getting rid of——"
"Miss Maliphant," says Dysart, who is feeling a little sore. The disingenuousness of this remark is patent to her.