“How can they help it?” he exclaimed. “Like you? They ought to worship you! They shall!”
She shook her head sadly.
“No one can compel love,” she said.
“Sometimes the love of one can atone for the indifference—even the hostility of the many,” he ventured.
But she had not stooped to the particular, he perceived. Her thoughts were ranging wide over an unknown country whither, for the moment, he could not follow. He studied her abstracted face with its strangely aloof expression, like that of a saint or a fanatic, with a faint renewal of previous misgivings.
“I am very much interested in Fanny Dodge,” she said abruptly.
“In—Fanny Dodge?” he repeated.
He became instantly angry with himself for the dismayed astonishment he had permitted to escape him, and increasingly so because of the uncontrollable tide of crimson which invaded his face.
She was looking at him, with the calm, direct gaze which had more than once puzzled him.
“You know her very well, don’t you?”