der to make peace, even if she burst into tears.
Possibly, of the two, his reflections were sadder than hers just then,
but she interrupted them with a question.

'Can you tell me of any one thing I do that jars on you?' she asked.
'Or is it what I say, or my way of speaking? I should like to know.'

'It's nothing, and it's everything,' answered Lushington, taking
refuge in a commonplace phrase, 'and I suppose no one else would ever
notice it. But I'm so awfully sensitive about certain things. You know
why.'

She knew why; yet it was with a sort of wonder that she asked herself
what there was in her tone or manner that could remind him of his
mother; but though she had spoken quietly, and almost humbly, a cold
and secret anger was slowly rising in her. The great artist, who held
thousands spellbound and breathless, could not submit easily to losing
in such a way the only friendship that had ever meant much to her. The
man who had just told her that she had lost her charm for him meant
that she was sinking to the level of her surroundings, and he was the
only man she had ever believed that she loved. Two years ago, and even
less, she would have been generously angry with him, and would have
spoken out, and perhaps all would have been over; but those two years
of life on the stage had given her the self-control of an actress when
she chose to exercise it, and she had acquired an artificial command
of her face and voice which had not belonged to her original frank and
simple self. Perhaps Lushington knew that too, as a part of the change
that offended his taste. At twenty-two, Margaret Donne would have
coloured, and would have given him a piece of her young mind very
plainly; Margarita da Cordova, aged twenty-four, turned a trifle
paler, shut her lips, and was frigidly angry, as if some ignorant
music-hall reporter had attacked her singing in print. She was
convinced that Lushington was mistaken, and that he was merely
yielding to that love of finding fault with what he liked which a
familiar passage in Scripture attributes to the Divinity, but with
which many of us are better acquainted in our friends; in her opinion,
such fault-finding was personal criticism, and it irritated her
vanity, over-fed with public adulation and the sincere praise of
musical critics. 'If you don't like me as I am, there are so many
people who do that you don't count!' That was the sub-conscious form
of her mental retort, and it was in the ma