Page:Claire Ambler (1928).djvu/230

 "Claire," he said quietly, "I think you've told other men just that same thing. Probably some of them have been weak enough to keep on hanging around rather than incur the kind of reproach you imply."

"What 'reproach'?"

"That they didn't care enough for you to be content with your liking them. That's a pretty old story, it seems to me, and so far as I'm concerned it's not helpful. I think you're the cruellest person I've ever known, Claire."

"Do you?" she said; and her expression, as she looked wearily away from him, caused his own to become one of desperation.

"Yes, I do—banal as you think me for saying so." He was not altogether successful in stifling an actual groan; it became audible, and that there might be no doubt of his suffering, a dew, not of the heat, appeared upon his forehead. "You've been genuinely brutal to me almost from the first," he said. "You're the most adorable thing in this world, and you know perfectly well that any man in his senses must see that you are. You knew at the very start that I thought so; you didn't care at all for me and yet you deliberately made yourself as enrapturing to me as