“No, perhaps I needn’t. You do what you like. But you are doing it well.”
He sighed then hardly above a whisper because they were near the state-room door, “Upset, eh?”
She made no sign, no sound of any kind. The thorough falseness of the position weighed on them both. But he was the braver of the two. “I dare say. At first. Did you think of telling him you were happy?”
“He never asked me,” she smiled faintly at him. She was disappointed by his quietness. “I did not say more than I was absolutely obliged to say—of myself.” She was beginning to be irritated with this man a little. “I told him I had been very lucky,” she said suddenly despondent, missing Anthony’s masterful manner, that something arbitrary and tender which, after the first scare, she had accustomed herself to look forward to with pleasurable apprehension. He was contemplating her rather blankly. She had not taken off her outdoor things, hat, gloves. She was like a caller. And she had a movement suggesting the end of a not very satisfactory business call. “Perhaps it would be just as well if we went ashore. Time yet.”
He gave her a glimpse of his unconstrained self in the low vehement “You dare!” which sprang to his lips and out of them with a most menacing inflexion.
“You dare . . . What’s the matter now?”
These last words were shot out not at her but at some target behind her back. Looking over her shoulder she saw the bald head with black bunches of hair of the congested and devoted Franklin (he had his cap in his hand) gazing sentimentally from the saloon doorway with his lobster eyes. He was heard from the distance in a tone of injured innocence reporting that the berthing master was alongside and that he wanted to move the ship into the basin before the crew came on board.
His captain growled “Well, let him,” and waved away the ulcerated and pathetic soul behind these prominent eyes which lingered on the offensive woman while the mate backed out slowly. Anthony turned to Flora.
“You could not have meant it. You are as straight as they make them.”
“I am trying to be.”