you nothing about it just
now. I admit you had a right to ask me, but I can say nothing more now."

Again the chance offered for him to make her forget Quisante or remember
him only by a disadvantageous comparison. His honest desire to save her
combined again with bitter prejudice to lead him wrong.

"I can't believe it of you," he declared. "I can't have been so wrong
about you as that."

"I see nothing to prevent you from having been absolutely wrong about
me," she said coldly, "as wrong about me as you are about--other people."

"If you mean----"

"Oh, yes, let's be open with one another," she cried. "I mean Mr.
Quisante; you're utterly wrong and prejudiced about him."

"He's not even a gentleman."

"I suppose he goes to the wrong tailor!" said May scornfully.

He came a step nearer to her. "You know I don't mean that sort of thing,
nor even other things that aren't vital to life though they're desirable
in society. He hasn't the mind of a gentleman."

Now she wavered; she sat looking at him with troubled eyes, feeling he
was right, desiring to be persuaded, struggling against the opposing
force. But Marchmont went on fretfully, almost peevishly,

"The astonishing thing is that you're blind to that, that you don't see
him as he really and truly is."

"That's just what I do," she cried eagerly and almost angrily.
Marchmont's words had brought back what Quisante could be; surely a man's
best must be what he really and truly is? Then his true self shows itself
untrammelled; the measure of it is rather the heights to which it can
rise than the level on which it moves at ordinary times. She remembered
Quisante on Duty Hill. "That's what I do, and you--you and all of
them--don't. You fix on his small faults, faults of manner--oh, yes, and
of breeding too, I daresay, perhaps of feeling too. But to see a man's
faults is not to see the man." She rose to her feet and faced him. "I see
him more truly than you do," she said proudly and defiantly. Then her
face grew suddenly soft, and she caught his hand. "My dear friend, my
dear, dear friend," she murmured, "don't be unkind to me. I'm not happy
about it; how can I be happy about it? Don't make it worse for me; I'm
trying to see the truth, and you might help me; but you only tell me what
leaves out more than half the truth."

He would not or could not respond to her gentleness; his evil spirit
possessed him; he gave expression to his anger with her and his scorn of