She shook her head. “We are just as safe here as anywhere on the Continent,” she remarked.
Once more he struck the table. Then he threw out his hands above his head with the melodramatic instinct which had always been strong in his blood.
“Do you think that I am a fool?” he cried. “Do you think I do not know that if there were not something moving in your brain you would think no more of that clerk, that bourgeois estate agent, than of the door-mat beneath your feet? It is what I always complain about. You make use of me as a tool. There are always things which I do not understand. He comes here, this young man, under a pretext, whether he knows it or not. You talk to him for an hour at a time. There should be nothing in your life which I do not know of, Elizabeth,” he continued, his voice suddenly hoarse as he leaned towards her. “Can't you see that there is danger in friendships for you and for me, there is danger in intimacies of any sort? I share the danger; I have a right to share the knowledge. This young man has no money of his own, I take it. Of what use is he to us?”
“You are too hasty, my dear father,” she replied. “Let me assure you that there is nothing at all mysterious about Mr. Tavernake. The simple truth is that the young man rather attracts me.”
The professor gazed at her incredulously.
“Attracts you! He!”
“You have never perfectly understood me, my dear parent,” she murmured. “You have never appreciated that trait in my character, that strange preference, if you like, for the absolutely original. Now in all my life I never met such a young man as this. He wears the clothes and he has the features and speech of just such a person as you have described, but there is a difference.”
“A difference, indeed!” the professor interrupted roughly. “What difference, I should like to know?”
She shrugged her shoulders lightly.
“He is stolid without being stupid,” she explained. “He is entirely self-centered. I smile at him, and he waits patiently until I have finished to get on with our business. I have said quite nice things to him and he has stared at me without change of expression, absolutely without pleasure or emotion of any sort.”