"I didn't mean that," he said; "at least I only meant that they all seem so bound up in a kind of clique, rather suspicious of strangers."
Within that enceinte of box hedges it was too dark now for him to see her face, but the tone of her voice was appreciably colder as she said:—
"And you want to join the clique?"
"No! I don't!" he protested with a touch of temper. "That's what they all seem to think; and as a matter of rather brutal fact, that doesn't tempt me in the very least. I wanted to explain to you, I thought you'd understand, that the only thing that tempts me in the offer your grandfather made me, was the prospect of a little rest and quiet. I feel that I've earned it. I've had my youth stolen from me and I want to get a little of it back—six months or a year isn't too much return to ask surely? And when this miraculous opportunity drops out of the skies, as it were, you want to deny it me. Why? I can understand the others. They've got no imagination. They have always had everything they want and they cannot see what this rest would mean for me. But I thought, I don't know why, that you were different. I didn't expect you to accuse me of wanting to join the clique."
She ignored his reference to herself; taking up a single sentence in his speech by the half-whispered comment: "'They've always had everything they want!' To any one from outside, I suppose they do seem to have had everything."
He overlooked the possible implications of that. "Oh! well; you know what I mean," he said impatiently; "everything that money can buy." He was afraid that she was going, as he put it, to preach.
"But you've evidently made up your mind to stay and have your rest," she replied, going off at another angle. "I can't see why you should bother to ask my advice."
"I haven't made up my mind," he asserted, "and I do want your advice. I only thought you might as well know first just why it tempts me so frightfully to stay."
"And there's Elizabeth," she put in, "you rather like her, don't you?"