“Have I displeased you?”
“Should I be here if you had?”
“But you don’t smile to me; you don’t seem happy to see me.”
“Oh! do you accuse me of sulking?” she said, looking at him with that submissive air which women assume when they want to seem victims.
Nathan walked on a few steps in a state of real apprehension which oppressed him.
“It must be,” he said, after a moment’s silence, “one of those frivolous fears, those hazy suspicions which women dwell on more than they do on the great things of life. You all have a way of tipping the world sideways with a straw, a cobweb—”
“Sarcasm!” she said, “I might have expected it!”
“Marie, my angel, I only said those words to wring your secret out of you.”
“My secret would be always a secret, even if I told it to you.”
“But all the same, tell it to me.”