“Oh, I can take care of myself,” said Rhoda.
She was rather dry of manner, and she would not even thank him, though his amiability made her feel ungracious.
He assumed an appearance of intense dejection.
“So you’re one of the strong-minded sisterhood,” he said dolefully. “Now I shouldn’t have thought it of you. It isn’t what one would have expected you to turn out, when I knew you first, ten years ago.”
Rhoda was silent. She looked at him cautiously out of the corners of her eyes, and saw in his the anxiety she had expected to see. He wanted to “pump” her, she knew, concerning the extent of her information as to the doings of the night of the death of Langton.
“You were as timid as a hare, a little shy girl with big eyes! But you were always nice to me then, much nicer than you are now. Why aren’t you as nice to me as you used to be?”
“I don’t think I quite know what you mean by ‘nice,’ ” Rhoda answered. “There must be a difference, I suppose, between the manner of a girl of seventeen and that of a woman of twenty-seven.”
“You haven’t taken a dislike to me for anything?”
She could scarcely repress a shudder, but she answered hastily:
“Of course not. Why should I?”