My eyes swept over the form beside me, as she sat cold, impassive;
her attitude one of quiet ease, her whole mien the essence of calm
self-possession. That excess of pride and dignity and supercilious
arrogance that in Lucia replaced, at times, her seductive plasticity
at others, had always exercised a violent attraction over me. And
now, when this pride seemed joined with a positive hostility to
myself, it failed to repel; it simply raised to its highest pitch a
savage and acrimonious determination to subdue it.
As I sat silent, with my eyes turned away from her to the blaze of
glaring pavement and roadway, and noted mechanically the crush of
traffic on ahead, Dick's remark on my brutality recurred to me, and
I forced the most good-natured smile to my lips, and the quietest
tone to my voice, as I turned to her and said,--
"Of course, dearest, I will consider it sufficient if you say so."
Perhaps she expected farther opposition, and my yielding surprised
her. She looked at me full for a minute in silence, then, failing to
discover a trace of the savage irritation I was feeling, she laid
her hand impulsively on mine, and said with a smile,--
"You are a dear, good-tempered fellow, Victor!" at which I laughed--
considerably.
The Academy is a place of all others, I should think, most
calculated to fatigue and oppress a person in nervous ill-health.
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