He said obstinately: "I'm getting sick of this Adriutha business."
"Well, I am.... It isn't false pride; I don't care what they think about me. If I chose to be a waiter in a Broadway café, their opinion wouldn't concern me.... I'm simply weary of the place, the majority of the people--what they think and do, their private life, their mere coming in and going out.... It isn't the pitiable absurdity of their offensive environment alone, the horror of the architecture, the gilded entrails of their abode--it's the whole bally combination! ... I'm sick--sick! And that's the truth, Diana."
"I think," she said, smiling, "that you are also a little bit bored with us."
He looked up at her, perplexed, already beginning to be very much ashamed of his outburst, already conscious of a painful reaction from his unrestraint.
"Diana," he said impulsively, "I'm just a plain brute, and rather a vulgar one; but, do you know, there isn't anybody else in the world I'd have permitted to hear that outburst--whether you take it as a compliment or not."
"You mean you don't care what I think of you?"
He thought for a moment. "I can't mean that, of course."
"I couldn't; I do care what you think of me. Probably what I meant was that I--dare say things to you; that I've a sort of instinct that I can come to you in an emergency----"
"In other words, that I'll stand anything from you?" she said, smiling. "I don't know about that, my friend."
He looked at her curiously. "I believe you'll stand a good deal from me--and still like me. I, somehow, count on it."
She met his gaze directly, unsmiling now.
"A hair divides my sentiments concerning you," she said. "Extremes lie on either side."
"I think so. It would take very little to fix definitely my opinion of you."
Sobered, but still curious, he sat his saddle more firmly while the horses paced forward, shoulder against shoulder, along the forest road.
"I didn't suppose you had any very violent opinions concerning me one way or another," he said lightly.
"Or would ever develop them, either," he added, laughing.
He said, after another silence: "What was it about a hair dividing your sentiments, and that extremes lay on either side?"
"Dislike--friendship--I suppose.... I'm a person addicted to extremes."