"That is what I am doing," he said.
"It is not a good plan, as a rule," she began, and then checked herself. "No," she said, "I won't say that. It is a worldly and Washingtonian sentiment. I will save it until next winter."
"Don't save it at all," he said; "it is an unnatural sentiment. It isn't true, and you do not really believe it."
"It is safer," she said.
He lay still a moment, looking down the hillside through the trees at the broad sweep of the river bend and the purple hills beyond.
"Bertha," he said, at last, "sometimes I hate the man who has taught you all this."
She plucked at the red-tipped moss at her side for a second or so before she replied; she showed no surprise or hurry when she spoke.
"Laurence Arbuthnot!" she said. "Sometimes I hate him, too; but it is only for a moment,—when he tells me the simple, deadly truth, and I know it is the truth, and wish I did not."
She threw the little handful of moss down the hill as if she threw something away with it.