He said, "Why, Eve? Why have you done this?"
She said, "Banning, do you know what a Jane Austen villain is?"
He shook his head. "Hardly my pitch, is it?"
"Hardly." There was a trace of sadness in her voice. Then, "A Jane Austen villain is an attractive, powerful, good-natured male who rides through life roughshod, interested only in himself, completely unaware of his effect on those unlucky souls whose existences become entangled in his."
"And I am a Jane Austen villain?" He was puzzled, disturbed that anyone—Eve or anyone—should think of him as a villain. Mentally he began to search for kindnesses, for unselfishnesses. He found generosities, yes, but these, he supposed with sudden dreadful clarity, had been little more than balm to his ego.
"You are perhaps a classic example, Banning," she told him. Her face, in shadow, was exquisitely beautiful. "When you left Lincolnville twenty years ago, without seeing me, without letting me see you, you destroyed me."
"Good God!" Coulter exclaimed. "But how? I know it was rude, but I did mean to come back. And when things moved differently it seemed better to keep a clean break clean." He hesitated, added, "I'm sorry."
"Sorry that you destroyed me?" Her tone was acid-etched.
"Dammit, do you want me down on my knees?" he countered. "How the devil did my leaving destroy you?" Anger, prodded by fear, was warming his blood.
"I was sensitive—aware of the collapse of my family, of my own shortcomings, of my lack of opportunity," she said, staring with immense grey eyes at the wall behind him. "I was just beginning to feel I could be somebody, could mean something to someone I—liked—when you dropped me and never looked back.