He wished he could have asked her not to.

He steeled himself. "Miss Dobson," he said, "I wish to apologise to
you."

Zuleika looked at him eagerly. "You can't give me luncheon? You've got
something better to do?"

"No. I wish to ask you to forgive me for my behaviour last night."

"There is nothing to forgive."

"There is. My manners were vile. I know well what happened. Though
you, too, cannot have forgotten, I won't spare myself the recital. You
were my hostess, and I ignored you. Magnanimous, you paid me the
prettiest compliment woman ever paid to man, and I insulted you. I
left the house in order that I might not see you again. To the
doorsteps down which he should have kicked me, your grandfather
followed me with words of kindliest courtesy. If he had sped me with a
kick so skilful that my skull had been shattered on the kerb, neither
would he have outstepped those bounds set to the conduct of English
gentlemen, nor would you have garnered more than a trifle on account
of your proper reckoning. I do not say that you are the first person
whom I have wantonly injured. But it is a fact that I, in whom pride
has ever been the topmost quality, have never expressed sorrow to any
one for anything. Thus, I might urge that my present abjectness must
be intolerably painful to me, and should incline you to forgive. But
such an argument were specious merely. I will be quite frank with you.
I will confess to you that, in this humbling of myself before you, I
take a pleasure as passionate as it is strange. A confusion of