“I consider Conny treats you exactly as you deserve.”
“What do you mean? do you really think I don’t--I didn’t love her?”
“You admired her, and mistook your feelings. It is fortunate for you both,” she continued, with great seriousness, “that you left Updown, as your absence has enabled you to test your own feelings as well as hers. You would have married her for her face, without asking your heart if it contained a more permanent emotion than admiration; and it is quite impossible to imagine how unhappy disappointment would have rendered you both.”
I laughed outright, so much was I amused by her cool and critical summary of my feelings. I don’t know whether she saw anything to disapprove in my merriment, but she remained very grave. There is no question but that I ought to have been abashed; that I ought to have cried, either aloud or to myself, “Can it be possible that my cousin speaks the truth? have I mistaken my sentiments? Has a ten days’ separation from the girl I was prepared to adore, coupled with a little trifling neglect on her part, taught me a right appreciation of the emotion I had regarded as the most exalted and undying love?”
But I indulged in no such soliloquy. Looking at Theresa, steadily, I said, “Do you think me a jilt?”
“No. If I did, I shouldn’t take the trouble to be commonly civil to you.”
“I have not said so. I don’t believe she is in love with you, and a man can’t jilt a girl who doesn’t care for him.”
“If I were conceited, I shouldn’t like to hear that.”
“Oh,” she answered, smiling, “this is a very old story. Pictures and books have been made out of it in abundance. Some silly writers vamp up a broken heart as a condition of the tale, but never yet was heart broken by people who didn’t know their own minds.”
She shook her reins, and started her horse into a gallop.
I rode with so much assurance now that I could admire her fine figure with my faculties entirely unengaged by the cares of the highway. How well she sat her horse! How gracefully her form responded to the movement of the animal! She was a finer woman than Conny. There was a tartness, too, in her speech that made her language relishable, with a spiciness I could not remember tasting in Conny’s conversation. I was both piqued and amused by the very cool way in which she had disposed of these sentiments of mine, of which, after all, she could only suspect the evanescence.
