In his pain he was quite intense and courageous.
“That’s not so!” she snapped, angrily and bitterly, irritated by the truth of what he said.
“And I wish you wouldn’t say that to me, either.
I don’t care anything about the old coat now, if you want to know it.
And you can just have your old money back, too, I don’t want it.
And you can just let me alone from now on, too,” she added.
“I’ll get all the coats I want without any help from you.”
At this, she turned and walked away.
But Clyde, now anxious to mollify her as usual, ran after her.
“Don’t go, Hortense,” he pleaded.
“Wait a minute.
I didn’t mean that either, honest I didn’t.
I’m crazy about you. Honest I am.
Can’t you see that?
Oh, gee, don’t go now.
I’m not giving you the money to get something for it.
You can have it for nothing if you want it that way.
There ain’t anybody else in the world like you to me, and there never has been.
You can have the money for all I care, all of it. I don’t want it back.
But, gee, I did think you liked me a little.
Don’t you care for me at all, Hortense?”
He looked cowed and frightened, and she, sensing her mastery over him, relented a little.
“Of course I do,” she announced.
“But just the same, that don’t mean that you can treat me any old way, either.
You don’t seem to understand that a girl can’t do everything you want her to do just when you want her to do it.”
“Just what do you mean by that?” asked Clyde, not quite sensing just what she did mean.
“I don’t get you.”
“Oh, yes, you do, too.”
She could not believe that he did not know.
“Oh, I guess I know what you’re talkin’ about.
I know what you’re going to say now,” he went on disappointedly.
“That’s that old stuff they all pull. I know.”
He was reciting almost verbatim the words and intonations even of the other boys at the hotel — Higby, Ratterer, Eddie Doyle — who, having narrated the nature of such situations to him, and how girls occasionally lied out of pressing dilemmas in this way, had made perfectly clear to him what was meant.
And Hortense knew now that he did know.
“Gee, but you’re mean,” she said in an assumed hurt way.
“A person can never tell you anything or expect you to believe it.
Just the same, it’s true, whether you believe it or not.”
“Oh, I know how you are,” he replied, sadly yet a little loftily, as though this were an old situation to him.
“You don’t like me, that’s all.
I see that now, all right.”
“Gee, but you’re mean,” she persisted, affecting an injured air.
“It’s the God’s truth.
Believe me or not, I swear it. Honest it is.”
Clyde stood there.
In the face of this small trick there was really nothing much to say as he saw it.
He could not force her to do anything.
If she wanted to lie and pretend, he would have to pretend to believe her.
And yet a great sadness settled down upon him.
He was not to win her after all — that was plain.
He turned, and she, being convinced that he felt that she was lying now, felt it incumbent upon herself to do something about it — to win him around to her again.