“I 'm not ironical,” she answered. “I should make poor work at irony. I meant just what I said.”
“The goodness was on your part in letting me come,” he said, mollified by the unmistakable sincerity of her tone, but somewhat embarrassed withal at the decidedly flat line of remark she had chosen.
“Oh, no,” she replied; “the goodness was not on my side. I was only too glad of your company, and might as well own it. Indeed, I will confess to telling a fib to one young man who offered to see me home, merely because I hoped the idea of doing so would occur to you.”
This plump admission of partiality for his society fairly staggered Arthur. Again he thought, “She must be quizzing me;” and, to make sure, stole a sidelong glance at her. Her eyes were fixed straight ahead, and the pallor and the tense expression of her face indicated that she was laboring under strong excitement. She certainly did not look like one in a quizzing mood.
“I am very much flattered,” he managed to say.
“I don't know whether you feel so or not,” she replied. “I'm afraid you don't feel flattered at all, but I—I wanted to—tell you.”
The pathetic tremor of her voice lent even greater significance to her words than in themselves they would have conveyed.
She was making a dead set at him. There was not a shadow of doubt any longer about that. As the full realization of his condition flashed upon him, entirely alone with her and a long walk before them, the strength suddenly oozed out of his legs, he felt distinctly cold about the spine, and the perspiration started out on his forehead. His tongue clung to the roof of his mouth, and he could only abjectly wonder what was coming next. It appeared that nothing more was coming. A dead silence lasted for several blocks. Every block seemed to Arthur a mile long, as if he were walking in a hasheesh dream. He felt that she was expecting him to say something, to make some sort of response to her advances; but what response, in Heaven's name, could he make! He really could not make love. He had none to make; and had never dreamed of making any to Maud Elliott, of all girls. Yet the idea of letting her suppose him such an oaf as not to understand her, or not to appreciate the honor a lady's preference did him, was intolerable. He could not leave it so.
Finally, with a vague idea of a compromise between the impossible alternative of making love to her, which he could n't, and seeming an insensible boor, which he wouldn't, he laid his disengaged hand upon hers as it rested on his arm. It was his intention to apply to it a gentle pressure, which, while committing him to nothing, might tend to calm her feelings and by its vaguely reassuring influence help to stave off a crisis for the remainder of their walk. He did not, however, succeed in carrying out the scheme; for at the moment of contact her hand eluded his, as quicksilver glides from the grasp. There was no hint of coquettish hesitation in its withdrawal. She snatched it away as if his touch had burned her; and although she did not at the same time wholly relinquish his arm, that was doubtless to avoid making the situation, on the street as they were, too awkward.
A moment before only concerned to evade her apparent advances, Arthur found himself in the position of one under rebuke for offering an unwarranted familiarity to a lady. There was no question that he had utterly misconstrued her previous conduct. It was very strange that he could have been such a fool; but he was quite too dazed to disentangle the evidence just then, and there was no doubt about the fact.