"I have no doubt you will, with perfect equanimity," she said, resentfully.
"Well, you remember what I told you at Brackly. I can't talk a lot of sentimental rubbish. It isn't in my line. If you send me about my business, I shall be awfully cut up. I shall never be quite the same fellow I was, again, I fancy. And if you told me to wait, I'd do it, if you thought you would get to care for me. But to make one of the crowd, and see you encouraging them—no, I can't, and I won't. I'd rather take the first train to New York, and return to Europe at once."
"You are quite at liberty to do so. If you expect an American girl to give up her old friends, at your dictation, you are mistaken."
"'Friends' is a convenient term. If they were your real friends I'd try and make them mine. They want to be something more, and are in reality much less. I shouldn't blame them for admiring you, God knows, if they were true, honest fellows; but they are not. They are double-faced. They are humbugs."
"The fact is, you are jealous of them," she said, laughing.
"I am not so stupid as to be seriously jealous of any one of them; but I am jealous, as every Englishman is, of the girl he loves wasting her sweetness—stooping to encourage a lot of men he thinks in every way her inferiors."
"Dear me! Men are very troublesome," said Miss Planter, stooping to pick a rose, "and Englishmen are the worst of all. John Bloxsome says—" Here she stopped short.
"What does Mr. Bloxsome say?"
"He says the English are the most arrogant nation on the face of the earth, and I am afraid he is right! You are awfully stuck up, you really are."
"Perhaps I am, as an Englishman. I am proud of being one. Not as myself, Mordaunt Ballinger. I have nothing to be stuck up about."