I view you with a feeling of horror."

The exasperating influences of her language, her looks, and her tones
would, as I venture to think, have got to the end of another man's
self-control before this. Anyway, she had at last irritated me into
speaking as strongly as I felt. What I said had been so plainly
(perhaps so rudely) expressed, that misinterpretation of it seemed to be
impossible. She mistook me, nevertheless. The most merciless disclosure
of the dreary side of human destiny is surely to be found in the failure
of words, spoken or written, so to answer their purpose that we can
trust them, in our attempts to communicate with each other. Even when
he seems to be connected, by the nearest and dearest relations, with his
fellow-mortals, what a solitary creature, tried by the test of sympathy,
the human being really is in the teeming world that he inhabits!
Affording one more example of the impotence of human language to speak
for itself, my misinterpreted words had found their way to the one
sensitive place in Helena Gracedieu's impenetrable nature. She betrayed
it in the quivering and flushing of her hard face, and in the appeal to
the looking-glass which escaped her eyes the next moment. My hasty reply
had roused the idea of a covert insult addressed to her handsome face.
In other words, I had wounded her vanity. Driven by resentment, out came
the secret distrust of me which had been lurking in that cold heart,
from the moment when we first met.

"I inspire you with horror, and Eunice inspires you with compassion,"
she said. "That, Mr. Governor, is not natural."

"May I ask why?"

"You know why."

"No."

"You will have it?"

"I want an explanation, Miss Helena, if that is what you mean."

"Take your explanation, then! You are not the stranger you are said
to be to my sister and to me. Your interest in Eunice is a personal
interest of some kind. I don't pretend to guess what it is. As for
myself, it is plain that somebody else has been setting you against me,
before Miss Jillgall got possession of your private ear."

In alluding to Eunice, she had blundered, strangely enough, on something
like the truth. But when she spoke of herself, the headlong malignity
of her suspicions--making every allowance for the anger that had hurried
her into them--seemed to call for some little protest against a false
assertion. I told her that she was completely mistaken.

"I am completely right," she answered; "I saw it