Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/207

 steps away from him as if to leave him definitely. But she stopped suddenly, and came back to him.

"I think I'll say something to you," she said. "I'll never see you again, because this is the last night; and I'd like to have it off my mind. It's about my manners on this trip. You know what I mean because you've had a sample of them at the table twice a day, and what I want you to understand is that they're my own responsibility and not my mother's and father's. They brought me up to be decent to everybody, and it's been the fault of nothing but my own beastly state of mind that I've behaved as I have on this voyage. It's my fault, not theirs; I want you to understand. I'm telling you this because I'll be able to feel afterwards that at least I made some explanation of my own rotten table manners and have that advantage over you, because though yours have been as bad as mine, you haven't dreamed of making any such explanation and never would. And I oughtn't to go without telling you that it's only I who've realized that your manners are as bad as mine. My mother and father haven't understood; they just thought you didn't know anything."

With that, she looked him full in the eyes once