“You may assume your air of magnificence, but I am dealing with uncomfortable factors.” He stopped in spite of himself, and then burst forth in a new order of rage. “You are trying some confounded experiment on me. What is it?”
She rose from her chair to go out of the room, and stood a moment holding her book half open in her hand.
“Yes. I suppose it might be called an experiment,” was her answer. “Perhaps it was a mistake. I wanted to make quite sure of something.”
“Of what?”
“I did not want to leave anything undone. I did not want to believe that any man could exist who had not one touch of decent feeling to redeem him. It did not seem human.”
White dints showed themselves about his nostrils.
“Well, you have found one,” he cried. “You have a lashing tongue, by God, when you choose to let it go. But I could teach you a good many things, my girl. And before I have done you will have learned most of them.”
But though he threw himself into a chair and laughed aloud as she left him, he knew that his arrogance and bullying were proving poor weapons, though they had done him good service all his life. And he knew, too, that it was mere simple truth that, as a result of the intellectual, ethical vagaries he scathingly derided—she had actually been giving him a sort of chance to retrieve himself, and that if he had been another sort of man he might have taken it.