“I’ve misjudged you altogether, Peter,” she said, “and I’ve got to confess. For days now—more days than I like to number—I have been watching you, looking for something I missed in you. I thought you were unkind and sarcastic and cynical about your father, and what he told me of the manner in which you welcomed his proposal to stop on here convinced me how utterly I had been wronging you. It was owlishly stupid of me to suppose you could be like that, and, what was worse, it was brutally unloving.”
Peter laughed.
“Any more big words coming?” he asked. “Owlish, stupid, brutal, unloving? That’s you all over. Have you murdered anybody?”
She shook her head.
“It’s no use making light of it,” she said, “It was stupid, it was unloving of me. I thought that because you saw certain absurdities and unrealities about your father, you saw nothing but them, and were impatient and untender with him. Do you forgive me for being such a fool?”
Peter tried to imagine himself telling her that she had been perfectly right throughout: that only a piece of trickery on his part, in getting his father to give an account of the welcome his proposition had met with, had deluded her into thinking she was wrong. But his vanity, the thought of the sorry figure he would present, made it quite impossible to contemplate so fundamental an honesty. Short of being honest, he had better be superb.
He stopped, facing her, knowing well the effect his physical presence had on her.
“You darling, there’s one thing I don’t forgive you for,” he said, “and that is for being such a fool as to think there was anything for me to forgive.”
Even as he made this neat phrase, the truth of it came home to him. There was indeed nothing for him to forgive. She gave a long sigh.
“Oh, you must teach me to be generous,” she said.