'I looked at him. The red of his fair sunburnt complexion deepened suddenly
under the down of his cheeks, invaded his forehead, spread to the roots of his
curly hair. His ears became intensely crimson, and even the clear blue of his
eyes was darkened many shades by the rush of blood to his head. His lips
pouted a little, trembling as though he had been on the point of bursting into
tears. I perceived he was incapable of pronouncing a word from the excess of his
humiliation. From disappointment too--who knows? Perhaps he looked forward to
that hammering he was going to give me for rehabilitation, for appeasement?
Who can tell what relief he expected from this chance of a row? He was naive
enough to expect anything; but he had given himself away for nothing in this
case. He had been frank with himself--let alone with me--in the wild hope of
arriving in that way at some effective refutation, and the stars had been ironically
unpropitious. He made an inarticulate noise in his throat like a man imperfectly
stunned by a blow on the head. It was pitiful.
'I didn't catch up again with him till well outside the gate. I had even to trot a bit at
the last, but when, out of breath at his elbow, I taxed him with running away, he
said, "Never!" and at once turned at bay. I explained I never meant to say he was
running away from me. "From no man--from not a single man on earth," he
affirmed with a stubborn mien. I forbore to point out the one obvious exception
which would hold good for the bravest of us; I thought he would find out by
himself very soon. He looked at me patiently while I was thinking of something to
say, but I could find nothing on the spur of the moment, and he began to walk on.
I kept up, and anxious not to lose him, I said hurriedly that I couldn't think of
leaving him under a false impression of my--of my--I stammered. The stupidity of
the phrase appalled me while I was trying to finish it, but the power of sentences
has nothing to do with their sense or the logic of their construction. My idiotic
mumble seemed to please him. He cut it short by saying, with courteous placidity
that argued an immense power of self-control or else a wonderful elasticity of
spirits--"Altogether my mistake." I marvelled greatly at this expression: he might
have been alluding to some trifling occurrence. Hadn't he understood its
deplorable meaning? "You may well forgive me," he continued, and went on a
little moodily, "All these staring people in court seemed such fools that--that it
might have been as I supposed."
'This opened suddenly a new view of him to my wonder. I looked at him curiously
and met his unabashed and impenetrable eyes. "I can't put up with this kind of
thing," he said, very simply, "and I don't mean to. In court it's different; I've got to
stand that--and I can do it too."
'I don't pretend I understood him. The views he let me have of himself were like
those glimpses through the shifting rents in a thick fog--bits of vivid and vanishing
detail, giving no connected idea of the general aspect of a country. They fed
one's curiosity without satisfying it; they were no good for purposes of orientation.
Upon the whole he was misleading. That's how I summed him up to myself after
