She was effectually checked, her ardour destroyed. Nettled by his assumption that only his nobility saved her, her pride came to the aid. He needn’t talk of giving her up when he hadn’t got her!
And, ignorant as Angelica was, a novice in love, she was able to perceive a certain falseness in his attitude. This was not the renunciation of a man who loved her better than himself. It was something different, which she didn’t understand, and which displeased her.
She had such a feminine longing to be captured and compromised that she couldn’t even imagine the motive which just then ruled Vincent—that powerful instinct of the male to escape entanglements; but her fresh and fervent spirit was able by instinct to perceive his staleness. Mystery as he was to her, she nevertheless felt, with perfect justness, that at that moment he cared nothing at all for her.
"Let’s turn back!" she said. "I told mommer I wouldn’t be gone long."
He made no objection. He took her back to her own door and stood hat in hand to wish her a good night.
"Angelica," he said, "I think you will thank me some day."
She didn’t reply, only turned and left him, and went into the flat.
Her mother was asleep, and everything was quiet. She sat down in the dark kitchen near the barred window, where a beam of light from a flat overhead, across the court, fell upon her.
"Well!" she said. "That’s over, I guess!"
An awful sense of frustration swept over her. That all this should stop before it had fairly begun; that this beautiful love should be stamped out—intolerable! It was not in her nature to submit; there was no resignation in her. She could not bear to be thwarted here, at the threshold of her life, at the very beginning of the adventure to which she had always looked forward.