“You quite gave me a jolt,” he said awkwardly. “I didn’t know any one was in the gallery.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked. She spoke to him as though she were addressing, an intruding servant. There was emphasis on the word “you.”
Her intention was so evident that it increased his feeling of being “rattled.” To find himself confronting deliberate ill nature of a superior and finished kind was like being spoken to in a foreign language.
“I—I’m T. Tembarom,” he answered, not able to keep himself from staring because she was such a “winner” as to looks.
“T. Tembarom?” she repeated slowly, and her tone made him at once see what a fool he had been to say it.
“I forgot,” he half laughed. “I ought to have said I’m Temple Barholm.”
“Oh!” was her sole comment. She actually stood still and looked him up and down.
She knew perfectly well who he was, and she knew perfectly well that no palliative view could possibly be taken by any well-bred person of her bearing toward him. He was her host. She had come, a guest, to his house to eat his bread and salt, and the commonest decency demanded that she should conduct herself with civility. But she cared nothing for the commonest, or the most uncommon, decency. She was thinking of other things. As she had stood before the window she had felt that her soul had never been so black as it was when she turned away from Miles Hugo’s portrait—never, never. She wanted to hurt people. Perhaps Nero had felt as she did and was not so hideous as he seemed.
The man’s tailor had put him into proper clothes, and his features were respectable enough, but nothing on earth could make him anything but what he so palpably was. She had seen that much across the gallery as she had watched him staring at Miles Hugo.
“I should think,” she said, dropping the words slowly again, “that you would often forget that you are Temple Barholm.”