She came to a halt beside a chair, and grasped the back of it with both hands. “Your behaviour, your manner—”
“Both abominable,” he said. “I beg pardon, insufferable was the word. I offer you my apologies.”
“Your way of speaking of a gentleman who is my cousin—”
“Whom, if you please, we will leave out of this discussion.”
She gripped the chair-back more tightly still. “Your indelicacy, the total want of proper feeling that could prompt you to taunt me with an episode in the past which covered me, and still covers me, with shame—”
He held out his hand to her. “That was ill-done of me indeed,” he said gently. “Forgive me!”
She was silenced, and stood looking across at him in a frowning way for several minutes. At last she said in a more mollified voice: “I daresay I may seem to be conceited. If you say so no doubt it is so: you should be a judge. But I can assure you, Lord Worth, that my conquests, as you are good enough to call them, have not led me to suppose that every gentleman of my acquaintance, including yourself, is desirous of marrying me.”
“Of course not,” he agreed.
She said uncertainly: “I am sorry to have lost my temper in what you may have thought to have been an unladylike manner, but you will allow the provocation to have been great.”
“I will allow it to have been impossible to withstand,” said his lordship. “Come, shall we shake hands on it?”