He resumed: “This brings us to my self-charge of cruelty. I told her
that while we were on the subject I wished to state that her friends
took out the greater part of their sensibility in talk; and she
instantly flew at me, although behind her eyes I saw the suspicion
she fought down. She said her friends have a great power of belief, a
tremendous generosity; and as to critical taste--well, then, if their
judgments weren’t to be accepted, where were we for a criterion? I
replied to what I saw behind her eyes; I said she’d better go in search
of Mapes, then--that as his praise was so whole-hearted a session with
him might make her feel better. As for me, I told her, I never got the
feeling of sincerity in anything he said. She positively quailed. She
might have been seeing a ghost. She begged me not to say such a thing.
But I had stopped thinking solely of her. I insisted that he wasn’t an
honest man, that he hadn’t an honest eye, and that anyone could tell by
his voice that he was sly. She reminded me that he had nothing to gain.
But she was at the moment arguing with her intelligence, I knew, trying
to bolster her spirit which might turn to water. I was a cheap fellow
to say to her ‘I have still to discover what he stands to gain’.”
He tilted back, his hands clasped behind his head, and stared at the
ceiling. Now that she was not before him, to exasperate him by her
swift changes of mood, to bewilder him by her illogical veering with
the wind of her fancies and the shifting winds of her friends’ fancies,
he fell into a state of belated compassion. At this moment she must
have seemed to him, as always she did to me, a bewildered creature who
was hag-ridden, who could neither take care of herself nor bend her
neck to the care of another.
It was at this moment that the telephone rang. His face turned white.
With all the ringing that this particular telephone did, interrupting
talks between them with its insistent summons to the outside world, he
still, at this moment, feared.