"I beg your pardon," said I coldly.
If there had been room to pass I should have gone. What devil possessed
me? Certainly in all our relations I had found her direct and frank, if
anything, too frank. Doubtless it was the influence of my associations down
town, where for so many months I had been dealing with the "short-card"
crowd of high finance, who would hardly play the game straight even when
that was the easy way to win. My long, steady stretch in that stealthy and
sinuous company had put me in the state of mind in which it is impossible
to credit any human being with a motive that is decent or an action that is
not a dead-fall. Thus the obvious transformation in her made no impression
on me. Her haughtiness, her coldness, were gone, and with them had gone
all that had been least like her natural self, most like the repellent
conventional pattern to which her mother and her associates had molded her.
But I was saying to myself: "A trap! Langdon has gone back to his wife. She
turns to me." And I loved her and hated her. "Never," thought I, "has she
shown so poor an opinion of me as now."
"My uncle told me day before yesterday that it was not he but you," she
said, lifting her eyes to mine.
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