Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/241

Rh simply, doubtless, for he clearly held on, smiling through flushed discomfort and on the whole bearing up. 'Do you think I'm afraid of you?' He might forget me, but he would have to forget me a little more to yield completely to his visible impulse to take her hand. It was visible enough to herself to make her show that she declined to meet it, and even that his effect on her was at last distinctly exasperating. Oh, how I saw at that moment that in the really touching good faith of his personal sympathy he didn't measure his effect! If he had done so he wouldn't have tried to rush it, to carry it off with tenderness. He dropped to that now so rashly that I was in truth sorry for him. 'You could do so gracefully, so naturally, what we want. What we want, don't you see? is perfect taste. I know better than you do yourself how perfect yours would be. I always know better than people do themselves.' He jested and pleaded, getting in, benightedly, deeper. Perhaps I didn't literally hear him ask in the same accents if she didn't care for him at all, but I distinctly saw him look as if he were on the point of it, and something, at any rate, in a lower tone, dropped from him that he followed up with the statement that if she did even just a little she would help him.

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made him wait a deep minute for her answer to this, and that gave me time to read into it what he accused her of failing to do. I recollect that I was startled at their having come so far, though I was reassured, after a little, by seeing that he had come much the furthest. I had now I scarce know what amused sense of knowing our hostess so much better than he. 'I think you strangely inconsequent,' she said at last. 'If you associate with—what you speak of—the idea of help, does it strike you as helping me to treat in that base fashion the memory I most honour and cherish?' As I was quite sure of what he spoke of, I could measure the