e
door. It was not Alva hesitating there; it was Anita.

"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. It is inconceivable to me now that I could
have misread their honest story; yet I did.

"I had no idea your uncle's notion of honor was also eccentric," said I,
with a satirical smile that made the blood rush to her face.

"That is unjust to him," she replied earnestly.

"He says he made you no promise of secrecy. And he confessed to me only
because he wished to convince me that he had good reason for his high
opinion of you."

"Really!" said I ironically. "And no doubt he found you open wide to
conviction--_now_." This a subtlety to let her know that I understood
why she was seeking me.

"No," she answered, lowering her eyes. "I knew--better than he."

For an instant this, spoken in a voice I had long given up hope of ever
hearing from her, staggered my cynical conviction. But--"Possibly she
thinks she is sincere," reasoned my head with my heart; "even the sincerest
women, brought up as was she, always have the calculator underneath; they
deny it, they don't know it often, but there it is; with them, calculation
is as involuntary and automatic as their pulse." So, I said to her,
mockingly: "Doubtless your opinion of me has been improving steadily ever
since you