He got up abruptly and stood there nonplused, while she calmly went on packing. He hated her for it. She was rude, inflexible, callous. Her motives were unfathomable. She was never twice the same. Yet at this moment he believed he wanted her more passionately than he had ever wanted her before. He burst into suspicion.
"What's the real reason, Janet? Some one has written to you—Robert, I dare say?"
He took her silence for an affirmation.
"I thought so. Now I understand your change of attitude. He's been preaching at you. It's his specialty. His views, curse them, are like a drought. They dry up all one's spontaneity and natural affection. Long ago, in the tenements, I noticed his sinister effect on you. Whenever you went out with him, you came back with your heart hardened against me."
She laughed and said:
"What nonsense! You're quite wrong. Robert hasn't wasted any of his valuable sermons on me. He hasn't sent me so much as a scrap of paper."
"Then what has changed you, all of a sudden? Is it my father you're afraid of? That would be too absurd. He'll come around. He has got to come around. He can't help himself. I know too much about the business, its secrets and its weaknesses. So don't worry on that score."
"Claude, it's all very fine. But I don't see myself as your wife. I'd never do. You need a woman to manage you like a mother and to flatter you like a squaw. But—these jobs not being in my line—I'd criticize you like an equal. And you know you simply can't stand criticism."
Was she really rejecting his offer of marriage? Claude was appalled at the apathy of the feminine intellect in the face of a miracle. Didn't she know what his offer meant? (He tried to convey it to her—not in the exact words, but in euphemisms.) It meant a change of estate from mistress to wife. The wife of Claude Fontaine! The wife of a merchant prince of Paris, London, New York, etc. (the only sort of prince that counted in the twentieth century; no mere paper prince or petty Venetian dogeling, but a prince whose rank had an international validity and whose means could challenge the heart to name its wildest desire). It was not conceivable that she knew what she was about. Still, he had to face the possibility.
And this desertion on top of all he had endured in consequence of leaving America with her!