“I am sorry to say,” answered Lisbeth, staring at her vis-à-vis, “that I don’t know.”

“Then I must have mistaken you. I understood you to say that you had just received a letter from Miss Clarissa.”

“It was not a mistake,” returned Lisbeth. “I had just received one, but unfortunately they don’t write about themselves. They write about me.”

“Which must necessarily render their letters interesting,” said Anstruthers.

Lisbeth barely deigned a slight shrug of her shoulders.

“Necessarily,” she replied, “if one is so happily disposed as never to become tired of one’s self.” 30

30

“It would be rank heresy to suppose,” said Anstruthers, “that any of Miss Crespigny’s friends would allow it possible that any one could become tired of Miss Crespigny—even Miss Crespigny herself.”

“This is the third figure, I believe,” was Lisbeth’s sole reply, and the music striking up again, they went on with their dancing.

“He supposes,” said the young lady, scornfully, to herself, “that he can play the grand seigneur with me as he does with other women. I dare say he is congratulating himself on the prospect of making me feel sorry some day—me! Are men always simpletons? It really seems so. And it is the women whom we may blame for it. Bah! he was a great deal more worthy of respect when he was nothing but a tiresome, amiable young bore. I hate these simpletons who think they have seen the world, and used up their experience.”

She was very hard upon him, as she was rather apt to be hard upon every one but Lisbeth Crespigny. And it is not improbable that she was all the more severe, because he reminded her unpleasantly of things she would have been by no means unwilling to forget. Was she so heartless as not to have a secret remembrance of the flush of his first young passion, 31 of his innocent belief in her girlish goodness, of his generous eagerness to ignore all her selfish caprices, of his tender readiness to bear all her cruelty—for she had been cruel, and wantonly cruel, enough, God knows. Was she so utterly heartless as to have no memory of his suffering and struggles with his boyish pain, of his passionate, frantic appeal, when she had reached the climax of her selfishness and indifference to the wrong she might do? Surely, no woman could be so hard, and I will not say that she was, and that she was not inwardly 

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