"Next girl," said I flippantly. "You know, Thusis, there are others."
She stood like a statue for a moment. Then:
"This," she whispered, "is what I ought to have expected for lowering myself! ... I invited it—this affront——"
"Piffle," said I, "you know in your heart I'd sooner blow my bally brains out than affront you. Why say such things? Why pretend to yourself? You know well enough that I'm so head over heels in love with you that I don't know what I say——"
"I do!" she retorted in a white heat. "And I've got to listen to it—I'm obliged to listen to—to an insolent inferior——"
"I'm not your inferior."
"You are!"
"Why, you silly, unhappy little thing," said I, "what if you are some funny sort of princess—some pretty highness of the Balkans? Literature is full of them, and if you'd read a little fiction you'd learn that they all marry ordinary, untitled young men like me."
"Must I listen to such outrageous insults?" she demanded, standing up very straight and slender in her offended pride, and forgetting that her bare feet under her nightie became the more visible the straighter she drew herself—lovely, snowy little naked feet as slim and delicate as the pedal extremities of a perfectly moral and early Victorian Bacchante.
"Am I to stand here and endure this insolence from you?" she repeated, her gray eyes ablaze.