Page:Confidence (London, Macmillan & Co., 1921).djvu/204

 "I don't know that you are particularly humble!" the girl retorted. "The meekest and most submissive of her sex would not have consented to have such a bargain as that made about her—such a trick played upon her!"

"My dearest Angela, it was no bargain—no trick!" Bernard interposed.

"It was a clumsy trick—it was a bad bargain!" she declared. "At any rate I hated it—I hated the idea of your pretending to pass judgement upon me; of your having come to Baden for the purpose. It was as if Mr. Wright had been buying a horse and you had undertaken to put me through my paces!"

"I undertook nothing—I declined to undertake."

"You certainly made a study of me, and I was determined you should get your lesson wrong. I determined to embarrass, to mislead, to defeat you. Or rather I didn't determine—I simply obeyed a natural impulse of self-defence—the impulse to evade the fierce light of criticism. I wished to put you in the wrong."

"You did it all very well. You put me admirably in the wrong."

"The only justification for my doing it at all was my doing it well," said Angela.

"You were justified, then; you must have hated me fiercely."

She turned her back to him, and stood looking at the fire again.

"Yes, there are some things that I did that can be accounted for only by an intense aversion."

She said this so naturally that, in spite of a certain theory that was touched upon a few pages back, Bernard was a good deal bewildered. He rose from the sofa where he had been lounging, and went and stood beside her a moment. Then he passed his arm round her waist and murmured an almost timorous— 196