“I would rather not tell you.”
“I am tired of this constant, ‘I would rather not tell you,’” he uttered in undisguised impatience. “You speak the truth with more offense than most women tell a falsehood.”
She played with her fan without speaking to him.
“Stargarde tells me that you wished to have some conversation with me about your parents,” he continued; “yet, in your willfulness, you will not mention them to me.”
There was something in this new accusation that touched Vivienne’s sense of humor, which was always present with her. He saw her roguish smile and resented it. Scarcely knowing what he did he seized the little white-gloved hand in his: “We are alone for the first time for days. Ask me now what questions you will, and promise me that you will treat me with more friendliness for the rest of your brief stay here.”
“Ask you—promise you,” she said slowly, and with as much composure as though her hands were free. “Mr. Armour, we cannot be friends because according to you we are not equals.”
“Not equals!” he repeated. “What absurdity is this?”
“Some women will lie to their—to their acquaintances,” she went on. “I will not; and I say that to a man of your indomitable pride, a child that he has bought and paid for, as it were, and that has grown into a womanhood that may occasionally divert him, is not for an instant to be considered on an equality with him—that is, in his estimation. It is a toy, a puppet, with which he may occasionally amuse himself, then throw it aside.”
A variety of expressions chased themselves over his face while she was speaking. When she finished he dropped her hands with a smile: “I am right; I thought that your irrepressible and suspicious pride—with which mine cannot be compared—was at the bottom of this; but I will subdue it. Vivienne——”
“Is not this rather a serious and gladiatorial kind of conversation for a ball,” she interrupted, “a place where one should utter only small talk?”