“Don’t ask me, please! It’s of no importance after all. Talk of something else.”
“I don’t agree with you,” Brook answered. “It is very important to me.”
“Oh, nonsense!” Clare tried to laugh. “What difference can it make to you, whether I like you or not?”
“Don’t say that. It makes a great difference—more than I thought it could, in fact. One—one doesn’t like to be misjudged by one’s friends, you know.”
“But I’m not your friend.”
“I want you to be.”
“I can’t.”
“You won’t,” said Brook, in a lower tone, and almost angrily. “You’ve made up your mind against me, on account of something you’ve guessed at, and you won’t tell me what it is, so I can’t possibly defend myself. I haven’t the least idea what it can be. I never did anything particularly bad, I believe, and I never did anything I should be ashamed of owning. I don’t like to say that sort of thing, you know, about myself, but you drive me to it. It isn’t fair. Upon my word, it’s not fair play. You tell a man he’s a bad lot, like that, in the air, and then you refuse to say why you think so. Or else the whole thing is a sort of joke you’ve invented—if it is, it’s awfully one-sided, it seems to me.”
“Do you really think me capable of anything so silly?” asked Clare.
“No, I don’t. That makes it all the worse, because it proves that you have—or think you have—something against me. I don’t know much about law, but it strikes me as something tremendously like libel. Don’t you think so yourself?”