Page:Haworth's.djvu/295

Rh He faltered visibly.

"And yet you are permitting yourself to—to be talked over and—misunderstood."

"Do you think," she asked, in the same voice, "that I care for being 'talked over?'"

"You would care if you knew what is said," he responded. "You do not know."

"I can guess," she replied, "easily."

But she was deadly pale and he saw it, and her humiliation was that she knew he saw it.

"What you do," he continued, "is of more consequence than what most women do. You are not popular. You have held yourself very high and have set people at defiance. If you should be guilty of a romantic folly, it would go harder with you than with others."

"I know that," she answered him, "far better than you do."

She held herself quite erect and kept her eyes steadily upon him.

"What is the romantic folly?" she put it to him. He could not have put it into words just then if his life had depended upon his power to do it.

"You will not commit it." he said. "It is not in you to do it, but you have put yourself in a false position, and it is very unpleasant for both of us."

She stopped him.

"You are very much afraid of speaking plainly," she said. "Be more definite."

He flushed to the roots of his hair in his confusion and uneasiness. There was no way out of the difficulty.

"You have adopted such a manner with the world generally," he floundered, "that a concession from you means a great deal. You—you have been making extraordinary