Archer felt the irony but did not dare to take it up. After all, she had perhaps purposely deflected the conversation from her own affairs, and after the pain his last words had evidently caused her he felt that all he could do was to follow her lead. But the sense of the waning hour made him desperate: he could not bear the thought that a barrier of words should drop between them again.
“Yes,” he said abruptly; “I went south to ask May to marry me after Easter. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be married then.”
“And May adores you—and yet you couldn’t convince her? I thought her too intelligent to be the slave of such absurd superstitions.”
“She is too intelligent—she’s not their slave.”
Madame Olenska looked at him. “Well, then—I don’t understand.”
Archer reddened, and hurried on with a rush. “We had a frank talk—almost the first. She thinks my impatience a bad sign.”
“Merciful heavens—a bad sign?”
“She thinks it means that I can’t trust myself to go on caring for her. She thinks, in short, I want to marry her at once to get away from someone that I—care for more.”
Madame Olenska examined this curiously. “But if she thinks that—why isn’t she in a hurry too?”
“Because she’s not like that: she’s so much nobler. She insists all the more on the long engagement, to give me time—”