“The lady will direct you,” he told his chauffeur, stepping back.
She leaned out of the window and gave an address to the man. Then she turned to Jacob. She was very pale but her eyes were ablaze.
“I just want to tell you,” she said, “that from the bottom of my heart I hate and detest you.”
The car glided away, and Jacob walked across the Square towards a taxicab stand.
CHAPTER XIV
Jacob, on the following morning, received a pencilled epistle from Sybil which brought him little satisfaction. There was no orthodox commencement, and it was written on sheets of paper torn apparently from a block:
I have been asking myself, on my way into exile—where I am going to stay with some pestilential relatives in Devonshire—exactly why I dislike you more and more every time we come into contact with one another, and I have come to the conclusion that it is because in our controversies you are nearly always right and I am nearly always wrong. I suppose, as a matter of fact, I haven’t the slightest reason in harbouring ill-will against you for refusing to put your money into the business which my father had allowed to become derelict. I am quite sure that you gave me good advice when you told me to keep away from those men who tried to rob you. In short, you are always right and I am always wrong, and I hate you all the more for it.
I shall not return to London for at least a good many months. During that time I do beg that you will sit down and forget all about me. Have an affair with Grace, if you like, flirt with any one you want to, or, better still, get married. But I tell you honestly that it absolutely irritates and angers me to be made conscious of your—shall I call it devotion? There is something antagonistic between us. I don’t know what it is, but I do know that I shall never change. And I beg you, therefore, to do as I ask you—forget that such a person exists.