"We can pretend it is winter."
She gave him his cup of tea, with the same gesture that had charmed Nigel on the day when he first visited her. Then she handed him a plate with little bits of lemon on it.
"I've found out your tastes, you see. I know you never take milk."
He was obliged to feel grateful. Yet something in him longed to refuse the lemon, the something that never ceased from denouncing her. He uttered the right banality: "How good of you to bother about me!"
"But you bother about me, and on your only free day! Don't you think I am grateful to you?"
There was no mockery in her voice. Today her irony was concealed, but, like a carefully-covered fire, he knew it was burning still. And because it was covered he resented it. He resented this comedy they were playing, the insincerity into which she was smilingly leading him. She could not imagine that she deceived him. She was far too clever for that. Then what was the good of it all?--that she had put him, that she kept him, at a disadvantage.
She handed him the muffins. She ministered to him as if she wanted to pet him. Again he had to feel grateful. Even in acute dislike men must be conscious of real charm in a woman. And Isaacson did not know how to ignore anything that was beautiful. Had the Devil come to him--with a grace, he must have thought, "How graceful is the Devil!" Now he was charmed by her gesture. Nevertheless, being a man of will, and, in the main, a man who was very sincere, he called up his hard resolutions, and said: "No, I don't think you are grateful. I don't think you are the woman to be grateful without a cause."
"Or with one," he mentally added.
"But here is the cause!"
She touched his sleeve. And suddenly, with that touch, all her charm for him vanished, and he was angry with her for daring to treat him like those boys by whom she had been surrounded, for daring to think that she could play upon the worst in him.
"I'm afraid you are mistaken," he said. "I am no cause for your gratitude."
She looked more cordial and natural even than before.
"But I think you are. For you don't really like me, and yet you come to see me. That is unselfishness."
"Only supposing what you say were true, and that you did like me."
"I do like you."
She said it quite simply, without emphasis. And even to him it sounded true.