Yes, it is worthy of you!" She walked rapidly up and down,
and then suddenly faced him. "I understand it all; I appreciate your
magnanimity now. You are willing I should join the company of these
chivalrous gentlemen in order to give color to your calumnies! Say at
once that it was you who put up this spy to correspond with me--to come
here--in order to entrap me. Yes entrap me--I--who a moment ago stood up
for you before these gentlemen, and said you could not lie. Bah!"
Struck only by the wild extravagance of her speech and temper, Clarence
did not know that when women are most illogical they are apt to be most
sincere, and from a man's standpoint her unreasoning deductions appeared
to him only as an affectation to gain time for thought, or a theatrical
display, like Susy's. And he was turning half contemptuously away, when
she again faced him with flashing eyes.
"Well, hear me! I accept; I leave here at once, to join my own people,
my own friends--those who understand me--put what construction on it
that you choose. Do your worst; you cannot do more to separate us than
you have done just now."
She left him, and ran up the steps with a singular return of her old
occasional nymph-like nimbleness--the movement of a woman who had never
borne children--and a swish of her long skirts that he remembered
for many a day after, as she disappeared in the corridor.
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