Ruth laughed.
“All right,” she unblushingly owned up. “The only man I've ever seriously cared for isn't Bertrando Bertrandoni. But what then? Let us look at it as men of the world. What has that poor devil got to do with the question of my marriage? You yourself told me that he was the last man alive I should think of leading to the altar. You said the persons we care for in our calf-period are always the wrong persons. And what some people say carries double weight, because”—that not entirely friendly light flickered again in her eyes for a second—“because they teach by example as well as precept.”
And of course the words weren't out of her mouth before she regretted them.
Pontycroft said nothing, made no sign. It may be that his sun-burned skin flushed a little, that the lines of his forehead wavered. He sat with his homely face turned towards Florence, and appeared to be considering the effect of his cigarette-smoke on the view.
Ruth waited, and the interval seemed long. She looked guilty, she looked frightened, her eyes downcast, her lips parted, a conscious culprit, bowing her head to receive the blow she had provoked. But no blow fell. She waited as long as flesh and blood could stand the suspense. At last she sprang up.
“Oh,” she cried wildly, “why don't you crush me? Why don't you tell me I'm a beast? Why don't you tell me you despise me—loathe me—for being—for being such a cad? Oh, Harry, I am so sorry.”
She stood before him with tight-clasped hands, her whole form rigid in an anguish of contrition. To have taunted him with a thing for which she should have greatly pitied him, a secret she had no right even to know, a grief, a shame, to which in decency she should never remotely have alluded—oh, it was worse than brutal, it was cattish, treacherous, it was base.
But he smiled up at her from calm eyes.
“What's the row?” he asked. “What are you sorry about? You very neatly scored a point, that's all. Besides, on the subject in question, a fellow in the course of years will have said so many stinging things to himself as to have rendered him reasonably tough. And now then”—he gaily shifted his key—“since Bertram isn't the favoured swain, let us hope he soon will be. It's every bit as easy to fall in love with one man as with another, and often a good deal easier. Come—sit down—concentrate your mind upon Bertram's advantages—and remember that words break no bones.”
Ruth's attitude had relaxed, her face had changed, contrition fading into what looked like disappointment, disillusion, and then like a kind of passive bitterness. Pontycroft waved his hand towards her chair. Automatically, absently, she obeyed him, and sat down.