And yet she liked him.
"I don't mean what I say," she repeated good-humoredly.

"Well-- ?" "I doubt whether you make absolute sincerity your standard in life," he answered significantly.
She flushed.

He had penetrated at once to the weak spot--her engagement, and had reason for what he said.

He was not altogether justified now, at any rate, she was glad to remember; but she could not enlighten him and must bear his insinuations, though from the lips of a man who had behaved as he had behaved their force should not have been sharp.
Nevertheless, what he said had its force, she mused; partly because he seemed unconscious of his own lapse in the case of Mary Datchet, and thus baffled her insight; partly because he always spoke with force, for what reason she did not yet feel certain.
"Absolute sincerity is rather difficult, don't you think ?" she inquired, with a touch of irony.
"There are people one credits even with that," he replied a little vaguely.

He was ashamed of his savage wish to hurt her, and yet it was not for the sake of hurting her, who was beyond his shafts, but in order to mortify his own incredibly reckless impulse of abandonment to the spirit which seemed, at moments, about to rush him to the uttermost ends of the earth.