Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/256

Rh me my answer tomorrow, I know it can’t be a cruel one.”

They had begun to walk onward as they talked, but at this she halted. “Please don’t take that tone. I dislike sentimentality!” she exclaimed, with a tinge of imperiousness that was a surprise to her own ears.

It was not the ﬁrst time in the course of her friendship with Stephen Wyant that she had been startled by this intervention of something within her that resisted and almost resented his homage. When they were apart, she was conscious only of the community of interests and sympathies that had ﬁrst drawn them together. Why was it then—since his looks were of the kind generally thought to stand a suitor in good stead—that whenever they had met of late she had been subject to these rushes of obscure hostility, the half-physical, half-moral shrinking from some indeﬁnable element in his nature against which she was constrained to defend herself by perpetual pleasantry and evasion?

To Wyant, at any rate, the answer was not far to seek. His pale face reﬂected the disdain in hers as he returned ironically: “A thousand pardons; I know I’m not always in the key.”

“The key?”

“I haven’t yet acquired the Lynbrook tone. You must make allowances for my lack of opportunity.”

The retort on Justine’s lips dropped to silence, as [ 240 ]