“I certainly said except. At this point in our conversation I could not ask you to accept me, for I can’t imagine what a woman would ever want of a liar.”
She shrugged her shoulders and ejaculated: “Hobson’s choice as for that!”
She looked as pretty as though she were being real good; in fact, she looked a great deal prettier. There was an impishness about her with which Reginald was more fully en rapport than he was with high goodness. True, she expressed disbelief in him, even on the one point on which he could somewhat justly value himself; but she looked “sort of loving” out of her eyes all the time; and Reginald had never resisted that kind of flattery.
And so they sat looking at one another; he a silly slave to her wiles, and crushing back the honest longing he had had for her approbation of his best virtue; and she, a slave to the conditions imposed on disfranchised womanhood, and crushing back her longing for his recognition of her individuality and her right to be of sound use to the world,—practical, sound use. She could not accuse him of deflection from that virtue which woman is taught to most strenuously hold herself, and man’s breach of which most cruelly afflicts her. So she accused him of lying,—a slave’s vice,—which he, not being a slave, need not lean toward. Thus they played at cross-purposes, neither helping the other out of the social tangle.
When he rose from the table it was with an angry perplexity.
“What in the mischief has set her to believe that I am such a liar?” he said to himself.
And as she went up toward her pretty private parlor she was thinking to herself: “He is as truthful a fellow, as far as his words and promises go, as I happen to know. But his fickle passions are what I despise him for. He really thinks I doubt that he has the rosebud and the poem on his table. I as good as saw them when he said it. But that means another love; and that is what he was gazing at, with his knife and fork in the air like a farmer. I’ve got the idea now. They were farmer’s people when he was twelve or so. He of course had that habit then, and he was thinking of his early boyhood and fell back into those rough ways. This new love, this rosebud flame, has something to do with old times. She can’t be a very young girl, then.”
And so soliloquizing, each within self, they walked up the broad stairway together.
“Your rosebud took you to boyhood, didn’t it?” she asked, turning square upon him at the landing, and facing him as he stood on the step below.
“It is no use saying yes or no; you don’t believe me,” said he, with a blunt boy-directness that seemed to touch her.