She seemed too impatient to hear me out.
"How can I believe you? People never act without design."
"I have explained my design," I said, repressing a smile with difficulty.
Her eyes were incensed. Their beauty made them almost unreal.
"You are still standing!" she exclaimed. "I beg that you will be seated. Pray do not mind me. I am of an excitable temperament, and when I converse it is difficult for me to keep still."
She left the window, went to the end of the room, and gazed at me thence, like some beautiful savage, untamed, startled, exquisitely unconventional.
I borrowed her tone; she was free-spoken; she would like free-speaking.
"My apology—if apology it were—does not contain the whole truth. But your goodness will not allow you to think me so great a culprit as I appear. I had met you once; your appearance piqued me; I desired to make your acquaintance and have tried an experiment which I beseech you not to render ignominious."
"Piqued, Sir! How were you piqued?"