HE had seen Hilma Tree give him a look in the dairy.

Aha, he saw through her! She was trying to get a hold on him, was she?
He would show her.

Wait till he saw her again.

He would send her about her business in a hurry.

He resolved upon a terrible demeanour in the presence of the dairy girl--a great show of indifference, a fierce masculine nonchalance; and when, the next morning, she brought him his breakfast, he had been smitten dumb as soon as she entered the room, glueing his eyes upon his plate, his elbows close to his side, awkward, clumsy, overwhelmed with constraint.
While true to his convictions as a woman-hater and genuinely despising Hilma both as a girl and as an inferior, the idea of her worried him.
Most of all, he was angry with himself because of his inane sheepishness when she was about.