“I—why, I think I should be sorry for any woman who had lost what she wanted to keep,” Barbara answered. “If you discharged her because I——”
“You were not primarily the cause of her dismissal,” he said coolly. “I had already told you that I was tired of seeing the woman about.”
He was silent for a long time, gazing frowningly at the floor.
Suddenly he looked up and, meeting Barbara’s astonished and somewhat indignant eyes, held them steadily with his own.
“You are wondering why I came here to-day. You are afraid of me, and you doubtless fancy with the rest of the world that you—dislike me exceedingly.”
Barbara opened her lips to reply.
“Don’t take the trouble to deny it,” he went on, with a faint sneer. “I know what most people think of me, perhaps with reason. But I am myself, not another; and so far, fear—dislike have seemed to me unavoidable.” Again his rigid lips relaxed into something like a smile, and he looked questioningly at the girl.
“It ought to be easy,” she said uncertainly, “to make people like you. You might——”
“I know what you are thinking of,” he interrupted rudely. “But it wouldn’t do. People fear and hate a hard man; they despise a fool. I refuse to be despised.”
He rose and walked up and down the room impatiently as if his thoughts irked him. Finally he paused before the window where a scarlet geranium blossomed on the sill, and turned a singularly flushed face upon the girl. For a dazed instant she wondered with a thrill of painfully remembered fear if he had been drinking.