Read "The Dumpling" by Coulson Kernahan online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
A younger and more pessimistically disposed man than I might conceivably have been plunged into the depths of despair at being thus told by the woman he loved that she hated him. But, on the whole, I was not inclined to be altogether dissatisfied with the interview. Never before -- even though her words were sympathetic and her manner not unkindly -- had she failed to make me realise that I was kept at a distance; that I was an unvouched-for stranger, between whom and her the barriers of custom and convention still necessarily existed. But her words and her acts of to-day -- so it seemed to me -- were a tacit admission that the barrier had been removed. She had concerned herself sufficiently in my career to express a wish in regard to it (though here I fear she acted on her aunt's instigation rather than from any impulse or inclination of her own); she had made the granting of that wish a favour to herself, and had even suffered me to declare my love unreproved.
Her tears had, I admit, at the moment utterly dismayed me; but remembering the subsequent by-play of the uneclipsed eye, I was now disposed to think either that those tears were caused by pique at the fact that I had not more promptly acceded to her request, or that they were no more than the legitimate use of a woman's natural weapon for the confounding and undoing of man. Possibly, too -- so I tried to persuade myself -- the exclamation "I hate you -- I hate you! " was less an expression of personal dislike than a pretty woman's very pardonable exhibition of captiousness at finding herself thwarted where she had expected immediate submission and consent. With the assistance of Miss Clara, I hoped soon to regain whatever ground I had lost in her niece's favour, and as, after leaving us, the older lady had made straight for the garden, and had (as I could see from the window) been pacing it bareheaded, hands clasped behind her and deep in thought, I ventured to lift the window, and to ask her to spare me a moment before I went.