"That sort of thing ought not to be called love at all!" she answered energetically. "It is nothing but a miserable flirtation,--a miserable, wretched, unworthy flirtation."
"I quite agree with you," said Wimpole, smiling at her vehemence.
"Why do you laugh?" she asked, almost offended by his look. His smile disappeared instantly.
"You hit the world very hard, my dear," he answered.
"I hate the world!" cried Sylvia.
She was just eighteen. Wimpole knew that she felt an innocent and instinctive repulsion for what the world meant to him, and for all the great, sinful unknown. He disliked it himself, with the steady, subdued dislike which is hatred in such natures as his, both because it was contrary to his character, and for Sylvia's sake, who must surely one day know something of it. So he did not laugh at her sweeping declaration. She hated the world before knowing it, but he hated it in full knowledge. That was a bond of sympathy like any other. To each of us the world means both what we know, and what we suspect, both what we see and the completion of it in the unseen, both the outward lives of our companions which we can judge, and their inward motives, which we dimly guess.
But on this evening Sylvia felt that the world was particularly odious, for she had suffered a first humiliation in her own eyes. She thought that she had lowered herself in the colonel's estimation, and she had discovered that she had made a great mistake with herself about him.
"I hate the world!" she repeated, in a lower tone, almost to herself, and her eyes gleamed with young anger, while her delicate, curving lips just showed her small white teeth.
Wimpole watched her face.
"That is no reason for hating yourself," he said gently.