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She had turned away as soon as she spoke, moving as far from him as she had moved a few moments before from Cora. The silence that followed her question would have been seen by a spectator to be a hard one for either to break. “I don’t know what’s the matter with her,” he said at last; “I’m afraid I only know what’s the matter with me. It will doubtless give you pleasure to learn that I’ve closed with Mr. Prodmore.”
It was a speech that, strangely enough, seemed but half to dissipate the hush. Mrs. Gracedew reached the great chimney again; again she stood there with her face averted. “I thought you said he gave you time.”
“Yes; but you produced just now so deep an effect on me that I thought best not to take any. I came upon him right there, and I burnt my ships.”
“You do what he requires?”
The young man was markedly caught. “I do what he requires. I felt the tremendous force of all you said to me.”
She turned round on him now, as if with a slight sharpness, the face of responsibility—even, it might be, of reproach. “So did I—or I shouldn’t have said it!”
It was doubtless this element of justification in her tone that drew from him a laugh a tiny trifle dry. “You’re perhaps not aware that you wield an influence of which it’s not too much to say––”
But he paused at the important point so long that she took him up. “To say what?”
“Well, that it’s practically irresistible!”
It sounded a little as if it had not been what he first meant; but it made her still graver and just faintly ironical. “You’ve given me the most flattering proof of my influence that I’ve ever enjoyed in my life!”
He fixed her very hard, now distinctly so mystified. “This was inevitable, dear madam, from the moment you had converted me—and in about three minutes too!—into the absolute echo of your raptures.”
Nothing was more extraordinary than her air of having suddenly forgotten them. “My ‘raptures’?”
He was amazed. “Why, about my home.”
He might look her through and through, but she had no eyes for himself, though she had now quitted the fireplace and finally recognised this allusion. “Oh, yes—your home! It’s a nice tattered, battered old thing. It has defects of course.” With this renewed attention they appeared suddenly to strike her. However, her conscience dropped. “But it’s no use mentioning them now!”
They had half an hour earlier been vividly present to himself, but to see her thus oddly pulled up by them was to forget the ground he had taken. “I’m particularly sorry that you didn’t mention them before!”
At this imputation of inconsequence, Mrs. Gracedew was reduced to an effort not quite successfully disguised. “If you had really gone over the house, as I almost went on my knees to you to do, you might have discovered some of them yourself!”
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