This Marrying by Margaret Culkin Banning

Horatia made another effort to stop Anthony. She found herself disturbed beyond all control by this love of his. It seemed to her that such a thing had no right to exist in the same world with her feeling for Jim. She did not want to hurt Anthony -- she did not want to argue about his love. She merely wanted his love not to exist -- not to be there to affront her. If ever a woman's psychology was pure in trying to arrest the affections of a man, Horatia's was. So it was not enough to refuse Anthony. He must be recreated into the jolly friend that he had been. She would not have him as a lover. All this she tried to tell him and of course in the telling she laid herself open to misconstruction.

For Anthony could not see but that the discussion itself was a sign of his growing importance in her eyes. To him it probably would have been natural enough to have her refuse him and then decline to see him at all. But that did not suit Horatia. She wanted him to be just a friend -- to stop loving her. He was comparatively acquiescent. He told her that he thought she might some time come to care for him, and when she protested in real horror, he was gentlemanly enough to yield the point and adjust his conversation to the comfortable tone she wanted. It cheered Horatia immensely. She was too inexperienced to know that men have always yielded to women in form when they won a victory in fact. There was a new vigor in Anthony's walk as he left her after that.