ve been very glad. She knew,
oh, she knew so well, that she could have helped him best. Many a
noble woman has known it as she stood aside.

In the meantime Tommy had gone home in several states of
mind--reckless, humble, sentimental, most practical, defiant,
apprehensive. At one moment he was crying, "Now, Grizel, now, when it
is too late, you will see what you have lost." At the next he quaked
and implored the gods to help him out of his predicament. It was
apprehension that, on the whole, played most of the tunes, for he was
by no means sure that Grizel would not look upon the affair of the
glove as an offer of his hand, and accept him. They would show her the
glove, and she would, of course, know it to be her own. "Give her this
and tell her it never left my heart." The words thumped within him
now. How was Grizel to understand that he had meant nothing in
particular by them?

I wonder if you misread him so utterly as to believe that he thought
himself something of a prize? That is a vulgar way of looking at
things of which our fastidious Tommy was incapable. As much as Grizel
herself, he loathed the notion that women have a thirsty eye on man;
when he saw them cheapening themselves before the sex that should hold
them beyond price, he turned his head and would not let his mind dwell
on the subject. He was a sort of gentleman, was Tommy. And he knew
Grizel so well that had all the other women in the world been of this
kind, it would not have persuaded him that there was a drop of such
blood in her. Then, if he feared that she was willing to be his, it
must have been because he thought she loved him? Not a bit of it. As
already stated, he thought he had abundant reason to think otherwise.
It was remorse that he feared might bring her to his feet, the
discovery that while she had been gibing at him he had been a heroic
figure, suffering in silence, eating his heart for love of her.
Undoubtedly that was how Grizel must see things now; he must seem to
her to be an angel rather than a mere man; and in sheer remorse she
might cry, "I am yours!" Vain though Tommy was, the picture gave him
not a moment's pleasure. Alarm was what he felt.

Of course he was exaggerating Grizel's feelings. She had too much
self-respect and too little sentiment to be willing to marry any man
because she had unintentionally wronged him. But this was how Tommy
would have acted had he happened to be a lady. Remorse, pity, no one
was so good a