"Why don't you say something?" she asks in order to seem bright and easy in her mind.
"Because I don't want to hurt you in the great error of your ways."
"Ha, ha, ha," she laughs, too loudly and in a forced tone; "the great error of my ways! Well, really!"
And her anger grows, while I am assured and fatherly, standing on the firm ground of conscious virtue. Yet I say an unworthy thing like this:
"Don't throw yourself away, Miss Torsen!"
She raises her head then; yes, the Torsen type would raise her head and reply, pale and offended:
"Throw myself away?--I don't understand you."
But it is possible, too, that Miss Torsen, at heart a fine, proud girl, would have a lucid moment and see things in their true light:
"Why not, why shouldn't I throw myself away? What is there to keep? I am thrown away, wasted ever since my school days, and now I am seven and twenty...."
My own thoughts run away with me as I stand there wishing I were somewhere else. Perhaps she, too, in her room wishes me far away.