"Do you think I want to hear that
it is only convention and our neighbors that keep you with me? You have
no right to insist that your horridness is true of me, either. I--I
could hear music, if you would let me." She sank on the little
cushioned bench before her dressing table, where her youthfulness took
on a piercing aspect of misery. Fanny's declaration, not far from
tears, that she was just as she had always been was admirably upheld by
her appealing presence.
The tenderness he had admitted, reduced by a perceptive impatience and
the sense of having been wholly, wilfully, misunderstood, carried him
over to her. He took Fanny, with her face strained away from him, into
his arms. "Don't be an idiot," he begged softly; "you ought to be used
to my talking by now. Let me go on, it can't come to anything--" She
stiffened in his embrace:
"What do you mean by that?"
"Nothing, nothing," he answered shortly, releasing her; "where is all
that certainty you assured me of? If you go on like this I shall never
be able to tell you my thoughts, discuss problems with you; and it
seems to me that's very necessary."
"It has been lately," she spoke in a metallic voice; "nothing satisfies
you any more; and I suppose I should have been prepared to have you say
things to me, too. But I'm not; you might even find that I am not the
idiot you suspect."
"I was giving you a chance to prove that," he pointed out.
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