"Your explanations are crushingly convincing," he said, with a bow and a smile.
She watched him with an uneasy look, totally unconscious of any sense of obligation, accustomed as she was to have her requests for service regarded as favors. The reaction from their last interview had left her in a coldly antagonistic state, determined to pluck in the bud this progress toward intimacy which had so threatened her scheme of life. Now, seeing him collected and ironical, she was instinctively alarmed at the distance which he, not she, had placed between them.
"My dear Teddy," she began, in a more confidential tone.
"Teddy?" he said, smiling.
He was perfectly good-natured, and as she felt that he was not irritated, but amusing himself at her tricks which he had divined, she was uneasy under this ironical examination. She felt that he had escaped her; and, disturbed by this thought, she looked at him, seeing all at once his quality. As he had made not the slightest reference to the very apparent obligation which he had been willing to undergo for her, she felt his social superiority and his reticence of good breeding. Besides, other women—brilliant women—had been attracted by him: Mrs. Craig Fontaine, Mrs. Kildair, and, above all, Emma Fornez. But another mood had possession of her, the mood of the artist transformed by the joy of personal sensation. She wished to keep him, but at the moment she was irritated that such a little thing should come to interfere with the joy of the imagined future triumph.
"Don't be horrid, Teddy," she said impatiently, and, wishing to appease him quickly, that she might talk to him of the play, she continued: "The fact is, Mr. Garraboy has done everything he could for me. He sold my stocks a week ago, foreseeing this panic, and saved me several thousand dollars. He offered to give me his check for twenty-two thousand five hundred dollars, or to reinvest it for me when the time came in the enormous bargains that can be picked up now. What was I to do?"
"You're quite right, and I made a great mistake to mislead you so," he answered, with great seriousness.
"It wasn't your fault," she said abruptly.
"Wasn't it?" he said, opening his eyes with a show of surprise.
She comprehended that she would have to surrender, and, changing her tone to one of gentleness, she said: