He winced and turned hot as he sat alone in the railway carriage whirling away from town, just as he had winced and grown hot the other night, when, like some graceful white leaf borne on a wayward wind, she had lightly skimmed past him, brushing him with her soft, clinging skirts.
Her laughing, petulant reproach when he had refused to dance because he could not dance had left a little wound.
She had made him feel clumsy; suddenly she had seemed to recede from him.
It was the first time that he had ever felt awkward, and at the mere suggestion that he could look foolish in the eyes of this woman Rupert Haverford discovered that he was very like other men, some of whom perhaps he had judged hardly, and some contemptuously.
He had no definite intention in his mind as to how he should act. Indeed, it seemed to him that the future was not held in restraint by his hand or his power, and he laughed once to himself a little bitterly, as he recalled how he had gone round and round this subject of late, thinking entirely of his own feelings, and of how far the bewitchment that this woman had cast upon him was to be permitted to order his life.
In the lightest way possible Camilla had shown him that he made too much of his own importance.
It was not exactly his fault that he had grown critical and reserved where women were concerned.
If he had met Camilla when he had been a man struggling every hour to work himself into independence, he would never have questioned her right, never have sought to analyze what went to form her brilliant personality. He would have given her unquestioning devotion, seeing in her that spirit of grace and delicacy and beauty which had always been placed in his dreams: a gift at once necessary and unattainable.
But the burden of his great wealth had changed in a certain measure Rupert's nature; it had made him cautious, it had made him doubtful, and he was so imbued with that weighty sense of responsibility that he never took a step in any direction without great deliberation, and forecasting as far as he could the probable results that would accrue from any act.
Mrs. Lancing was not the only woman who fluttered in and out of his life in these days, who charmed him momentarily and pressed upon him eagerly sympathy and friendship and delicately insinuated homage.