"A very strong strain, just now," I suggested.
She laughed. "Yes, he's Brenda's slave; always will be," she said. "But I don't count her as a Jervaise. She's an insurgée like me--against her own family. She'd do anything to get away from them."
"Well, she will now," I said, "and your brother, too."
That seemed to annoy her. "It may sound easy enough to you," she said, "but it's going to be anything but easy. You can't possibly understand how difficult it's going to be."
She shrugged her shoulders as if she had suddenly become tired of my questions, perhaps of myself, also.
"I know I am," I admitted. "But--I don't want to remain outside."
"I don't know why I've been telling you as much as I have," she returned.
"I can only plead my profound interest," I said.
"In Arthur? Or in us, generally?" she inquired and frowned as if she forbade me to say that my chief interest might be in herself.
"In all of you and in the situation," I tried, hoping to please her. "I was prepared to dislike the Jervaises and all they stood for, before this talk with you. Now..."
"But you're well off, aren't you?" she said with a faint air of contempt. "_You_ can't be an insurgé. You'd be playing against your own side."
"If you think that, why did you give me so much confidence to begin with?" I retaliated.
"Oh! I'm always doing silly things," she said. "It was silly to play with that foolish Jervaise man this morning. It was silly to offend him this evening. I don't--_think_. I ought to be whipped." She had apparently forgotten her recent distrust of me, for she continued in the tone of one who makes an ultimate confession. "As a matter of fact, I suppose I'm chiefly responsible for the whole thing. I egged them on. Arthur would have gone on adoring Brenda as a kind of divinity for ever, if I hadn't brought them together. He's afraid to touch her, even now. I just didn't think. I never do till it's too late."
"But you're not sorry--about them, are you?" I put in.
"I'm sorry for my father," she said. "Oh! I'm terribly sorry for him." Her eyes were extraordinarily tender and compassionate as she spoke. I felt that if any lover of Anne's could ever inspire such devotion as showed in her face at that moment, he would indeed be blest.