"Making violent love to you—apparently."
"Ah! It's just as well you put in that 'apparently'," she commented quite tranquilly, though all the time she was saying to herself, "Bluff, Ermengarde, bluff! it's your only chance."
"You were crying——"
"Probably; I've had a good deal to cry about of late——" She looked down as she spoke to arrange the set of her blouse, and gave her drapery a few careful little pats.
"—Agitated. Perhaps you will offer some explanation of this?"
"Perhaps. In the meantime, perhaps you will offer some explanation of your conduct." She looked up, quite satisfied now with the set of the blouse belt.
"My dear child, this folly must end; this is a serious matter and not an amateur farce. You have landed yourself in a most compromising situation, made yourself the cause, the patent, acknowledged, loudly proclaimed cause, of an engagement being broken off; and you simply laugh at the whole thing."
"And if I have, as you say, brought myself into such a situation, pray, whose fault was it?"
"Whose should it be but your own, your own folly and wilfulness and insane disregard of common proprieties and decent conventions."
She had always understood that the Socratic method of conducting an argument consisted in asking, and never answering, perpetual questions, and being under the impression that Socrates was a person of quite remarkable sagacity, resolved to employ it. As on this wise.