He gave the bush another cut with his cane; for the fermentation of ideas within was quite unendurable. He had always supposed that women were made on purpose to flatter men, and he had always had so much of it that he was sick of it; but now when he cared a good deal to be thought well of, he felt it was a bit hard to be made to think of himself as he had been made to think all that morning. He had until now thought Ethelbert particularly attractive, because she was so bright; but now he thought her brightness was so overmuch of a good thing as to be perfectly detestable. The same hand that in wanton cruelty was whacking to pieces those exquisite moss rosebuds, would willingly have whacked out of existence all the high human tests of character which had stripped his soul bare before his gaze. Something of this, but not very clearly defined, made him hit the bush again as he looked at Ethelbert, who, free from a suggestion of reproof or sentiment of any kind, repeated: “Who cares?”
“I don’t,” said Reginald; and after a pause: “Do you?”
“Do I care that I can’t put the rose together again? I don’t aspire to do that; yet I do very much care to have all the power I can possibly obtain with which to arrest the destruction of beautiful life and orderly happiness.”
“Oh, yes, much you care to make a fellow happy,” said Reginald sullenly. “Look at the cold-blooded way you sat there and talked to that miserable thing about me.” And after waiting again, he said with the combativeness of a man opposed by silence, when instead he longed for a quarrel: “Now this is all very well, Miss Daksha, but you know that if you noticed—noticed—well, as you might say—if you smelt whiskey on her (now you’ve got it), if you smelt whiskey on her, you could—you are sharp enough to notice—anything, in fact,” said he, stumbling on under her steady uplifted eyes, “Aren’t you?”
“I notice many things,” said Ethelbert, like a little truthful child.
He hit the rosebush again. “You are a queer girl,” he said. “You have no respect for a man’s feelings.”
“What are those things?”
“What things?”
“A man’s feelings, I believe you called them,” said Ethelbert.
He came near her, with red passion-flushes patching his face like Satan’s finger-prints; and stood angrily looking at her. And then he slashed the air close to her with his cane; but he might as well have shot glances of rage at a lily-cup, in the hope of arresting the sweet aura it exhaled. He turned angrily away. “Well, I can just believe you,” he said. “You neither know nor care what feelings are. You care more about that old rose.”