“Is that a compliment?”
“Uncompromising truth. Don’t you see that it gives me the power of understanding you?”
This is an appeal which rarely fails with women, and Fenwick knew how to accentuate it by fixing his dark eyes upon the girl, and flinging an intensity of will into his gaze. She merely lifted her eyebrows.
“I dare say. I don’t think any one ever found me mysterious.”
He was angrily aware that she spoke truly. There were few complexities in her character to baffle any one, but there was for him a baffling directness and simplicity against which his efforts beat themselves in vain. She met them with an indifference which perpetually incited him to break it down.
Lady Wilmot was a little disappointed that Claudia did not carry out the promise of her first hours, for she was a small lady who liked nothing so well as amusement, and had foreseen a rich supply. With the other two or three who were staying there the girl was popular in her own way, which, however, kept her apart except at meals and in the evening. In truth, although she had taken Fenwick’s hint both lightly and good-humouredly, it gave her the sort of shock one gets by running full tilt against a wall. She had been anxious to impress those about her with the gravity of woman’s work, to see that they put it on a level with man’s, to shake off the faintest accusation of frivolity; and, to accomplish this end she was prepared to be pointed at and scorned. With such lofty aspirations nothing could be well more humiliating than to find herself considered a bore. Here lay the point of Fenwick’s moral, it was from this he wanted to save her. “A bore, a bore, a bore!” She scourged herself with the taunt, and vowed there should be no more of it, for to the young, ridicule is intolerable.
But the resolution made her feel curiously lonely. The girls at the college, mostly reformers, all enthusiasts, largely impressed with the part they had to play, and occasionally in more open revolt, incited and encouraged each other over their work, which seemed to them of supreme importance. When Claudia came out of this atmosphere it still clung about her, so that she babbled of it gravely, as she had babbled to her companions. Now she was sure she had been a bore, and the thought stung. It made her, also, silent and reserved, although this was so unlike her nature that she only got at it by sheer force of will. Fenwick had certainly offered himself as sympathetic, but she was shrewd enough to reflect, “What he warned me against, he feels himself. He is ready to talk because I am a girl and not bad-looking, but only on that account, not because he really cares.” And then thought flew to Harry Hilton, not with the wish that she had given him a different answer, but with absolute certainty that he would never have considered her a bore.