I think he is deeply impressed with his own astuteness.

If he were simpler he would be cleverer." Catrina was afraid of Claude de Chauxville, and, because this was so, she stared in wonder at the English girl, who dismissed him from the conversation and her thoughts with a few careless words of contempt.
Such minds as that of Miss Delafield were quite outside the field of De Chauxville's influence, while that Frenchman had considerable power over highly strung and imaginative natures.
Catrina Lanovitch had begun by tolerating him--had proceeded to make the serious blunder of permitting him to be impertinently familiar, and was now exaggerating in her own mind the hold that he had over her.

She did not actually dislike him.

So few people had taken the trouble or found the expediency of endeavoring to sympathize with her or understand her nature, that she was unconsciously drawn toward this man whom she now feared.
In exaggerating the power he exercised over herself she somewhat naturally exaggerated also his importance in the world and in the lives of those around him.

She had imagined him all-powerful; and the first person to whom she mentioned his name dismissed the subject indifferently.