"Well, won't you try?" he urged, puzzled at her quarrelsomeness and unable to reconcile it with the indifference he had feared. "You like me, don't you?"
Patricia shook her head, unexpectedly.
"No!" she cried. "I don't like you. I hate you. I shall always hate you. You make me feel such a cad!"
And with that she left him, going in search of Claudia. Edgar, his heart beating, and his temper ruffled, remained standing as he had stood during the latter part of their interview. He did not see her again that night. She had left the house by the time Claudia returned to the room, and brother and sister averted their eyes from each other at their first encounter.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: PLAYING WITH FIRE
i
Patricia made some important discoveries about herself within the next twelve hours. She was sleepless, and her brain was active. She found that all love-stories were entirely wrong, that they were too simple and too prudish. They did not represent her own feelings at all. And the more she tried to discover what her own feelings were, the more bewildered she became. Like so many other matters connected with herself, as to which she had no standards of comparison, her feelings seemed to Patricia to be unique. She was both ashamed and exultant at this.
At first she was too frantically troubled at the position in which she found herself to be anything but exclamatory. Within an amazingly short time she had allowed three men to make love to her, if with certain restrictions; and her sense of purity was horrified at this. There immediately followed, by reaction, some vehement attempts to justify her own conduct. But when she had been hysterical for a little while Patricia became calmer. The calm was even more false than the hysteria. It was in fact a feature of advanced hysteria. She was not equal to the strain which the events of the last few days had created.