And he was not only ungentlemanly but positively
unkind. If they met on the stairs (somehow they did this very often)
he would draw himself up flat against the wall as if he was afraid of
the frill of her dress touching him. If she came into the drawing-room
he would walk out of it; or if he stayed, it was only to sit staring
at her (poor innocent little Flossie, who was so pretty) with an ugly
scowl on his face. There were times when poor innocent little Flossie
said to herself that she positively believed he hated her. And she was
so innocent that she couldn't think what she had done to make him hate
her.
She was right about the hatred. An indignant anger was certainly what
he felt when he first realized that she had power to make him feel at
all. Her prettiness tormented him; therefore he hated her, and
everything about her. He hated the sound of her little tongue upraised
among the boarders, and of her little feet running up and down the
stairs. He hated every glance of her black eyes and every attitude and
movement of her plump little body. More than all he hated the touch of
her soft arms as they stirred against him at the tightly packed
dinner-table. Therefore he avoided the dinner-table, and the
drawing-room; he avoided as far as possible the house, filled as it
was with the disastrous presence. He fatigued himself with excesses of
walking and cycling, in the hope that when he flung himself into his
bed at midnight he would be too tired to feel.
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