"Why should you imagine that I am anxious to avoid you?"
He said, with gratifying embarrassment: "I naturally couldn't hope that--you would wish to see me--"
And then suddenly all her just and fortifying resentment seemed to return to her, and she said with frosty calm:
"Yes, I've rather wanted to see you again. I didn't quite place you when--I had this opportunity before...."
The man regarded the floor. He looked as if he knew what was coming.
"I've recently read your letter in the 'Post' about my father. Tell me, what pleasure do you find in writing such wicked untruths about people who've never harmed you?"
In her mind it had seemed exactly the thing to say, the rebuke which would put him finally in his place on all scores, show him up completely to himself. But the moment it was out, it acquired somehow the wrong sound, jangling and a little shrewish and somewhat common, and she rather wished she hadn't said it. She had never seen anybody turn pale so suddenly....
The man wore the same clothes he had worn in the summer-house, she thought; indubitably the same large four-in-hand, floating the fat white painted shad, or perch. He was rather better-looking in the face than she had supposed; and in this light she observed more clearly the rather odd expression he wore about the eyes, a quality of youthful hopefulness, a sort of confidingness: not the look of a brick-thrower, unless you happened to know the facts in the case. All this, of course, was his own lookout. If he wanted to say and do outrageous things, he had no right to appear so pained when he got his merited punishment. He had no right to put on that appealing look. He had no right to be lame....
"It is perfectly natural for you to say and think that," he was saying with an odd air of introspection, quite as if he were reassuring somebody inside of him. "I don't think there was anything untrue in that letter, but--no doubt it must have seemed so. And of course ... I don't suppose you can go to the Heth Works much, or be very familiar--"
"It isn't necessary for me to go to the Works to learn that my father is not a homicide."