Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 2.djvu/180

172 "You do too much. You're awfully good, you're generous, you're a dear fellow; but I don't believe in it. I didn't, at bottom, from the first—that's why I made you wait, why I gave you your freedom. Oh, I've suspected you! I had my ideas. It's all right for you, but it won't do for me: I'm different altogether. Why should it always be put upon me, when I hate it? What have I done? I was drenched with it, before." These last words, as they broke forth, were accompanied, even as the speaker uttered them, with a quick blush; so that Nick could as quickly discern in them the uncalculated betrayal of an old irritation, an old shame almost—her late husband's flat, inglorious taste for pretty things, his indifference to every chance to play a public part. This had been the mortification of her youth, and it was indeed a perversity of fate that a new alliance should contain for her even an oblique demand for the same spirit of accommodation, impose on her the secret bitterness of the same concessions. As Nick stood there before her, struggling sincerely with the force that he now felt to be strong in her, the intense resolution to break with him, a force matured in a few hours, he read a riddle that hitherto had baffled him, saw a great mystery become simple. A personal passion for him had all but thrown her into his arms (the sort of thing that even a vain man—and Nick was not especially vain—might hesitate to recognize the strength of); held in check, with a tension of the cord at moments of which he could still feel the vibration, by her deep, her rare ambition, and arrested at the last only just in time to save her calculations. His present glimpse of the immense extent of these calculations did not make him think