"I ought not to see you to-night, just to punish myself," she said brokenly. "You don't know how crazy I was when I was talking to Blair. I was crazy! Oh, why, when I was a child, didn't they make me control my temper? I suppose I'm like—my mother," she ended in a whisper. "And I can't change, now; I'm too old."
David smiled. "You are terribly old," he said. Like everybody else, save Mrs. Richie, David accepted Elizabeth's temper as a matter of course. "She doesn't mean anything by it," her little world had always said; and put up with the inconvenience of her furies, with the patience of people who were themselves incapable of the irrationalities of temper. "Oh, you are a hardened sinner," David mocked.
"You do forgive me?" she whispered.
At that he was grave. "There is nothing I wouldn't forgive, Elizabeth."
"But I have stabbed you?"
"Yes; a little; but I am yours to stab."
Her eyes filled. "Oh, it is so wonderful, that you go on loving me,
David!"
"You go on loving me," he rallied her; "in spite of my dullness and slowness, and all that."
But Elizabeth was not listening. "Sometimes it frightens me to get so angry," she said, with a somber look. "It was just the same when I was a little girl; do you remember the time I cut off my hair? I think you had hurt my feelings; I forget now what you had done. I was always having my feelings hurt! Of course I was awfully silly. It was a relief then to spoil my body, by cutting off my hair. This afternoon it was a relief to put mud on my soul."
He looked at her, trying to find words tender enough to heal the wounds she had torn in her own heart; not finding them, he was silent.