She had a rhapsody of praise for him after he had gone, and Rosaleen listened to it with delight. Then she too went home. She was proud, triumphant, exultant. But it was a most perilous joy; she dared not examine it. Those words haunted her. She mustn’t meet him on street corners—like a servant girl.
She was dusting the top of Mr. Humbert’s desk.
“What else am I?” she asked herself, with terrible bitterness. “They talk about my ‘advantages,’ and my being a ‘member of the household’.... But what am I really?”
She flung down the cloth.
“Oh, what’s the use!” she cried. “It might just as well end now, better end now—than after he finds out.”
CHAPTER FIVE
I
Rosaleen’s great mistake lay in not telling him then. Because at this time he wouldn’t have cared. At this moment she was still a romantic and thrilling figure, not yet quite flesh and blood, still without flaw or fault. Her pitiful history would only have enslaved him more completely. And as he grew to know her better, he would have known her with this fact, this history in his mind. Whereas, on the contrary, he was beginning to love a girl who did not exist.
He saw her transcendent kindness, her absolute lack of egoism, her rare and lovely spirit, but he called it and he thought of it as ladylike delicacy. It was her soul; he thought it was her manners.
He walked all the way home, reflecting upon her, lost in a revery half troubled, half delightful. A sweet, a wonderful girl—but obstinate. And obstinacy he did not like. He was the most outrageous young tyrant who ever lived. He ruled everyone, he always had ruled everyone. His mother had never thwarted him, his sister had never rebelled; whatever friends he had selected in school and college had followed his lead with satisfactory submissiveness. He had the qualities of a leader; the immense self-assurance, the severe determination to get his own way, and he had that magic idea in his mind, which subtly communicates itself and changes the very atmosphere, which enthralls all minds more sensitive and therefore less positive—that idea of his own superiority. He came of an old Carolina family, and he believed himself to be better born than anyone about him; he had been successful in his studies, and he believed himself to be cleverer than anyone about him. Appearance didn’t trouble him; he didn’t think himself handsome, and he didn’t care. He knew very well that he was attractive, and that people liked him. Even the fact of being poor didn’t bother him. He wouldn’t stay so.