"A million times a day."
"To you it's a joke. But if you loved as I do you would not be up to joking."
"Very well, I'll cry." And I personated a boy crying. "Don't. It breaks my heart," she said, earnestly. "I can't see you crying even for fun." She kissed my eyes. "No, really, I go to your room twenty times a day, perhaps.
When I am there it seems to me that I am nearer to you. I kiss the pillow on which you sleep. I pat the blanket, the pitcher, every book of yours—everything your dear little hands touch. I want you to know it. I want you to know how I love you. I knew that love was sweet, but I never knew that it was so sweet. Oh, my loved one!"
She would pour out all sorts of endearments on me, some of them rather of a fantastic nature, but "my loved one" became her favorite appellation, while I found special relish in calling her "my bride" or "bridie mine."
I can almost feel her white fingers as they played with my abundant dark hair or rested on my shoulders while she looked into my eyes and murmured, yearningly: "My loved one! My loved one! My loved one!"
The set of my shoulders was a special object of her admiration. She would shake them tenderly, call me monkey, and ask me if I realized how much she loved me and if I deserved it all, bad boy that I was
She held me in check with an iron hand. Whenever my caresses threatened to overstep the bounds of what she termed "respectable love" she would stop them. With clouded eyes she would slap my hand and then kiss it, saying: "Be a gentleman, Levinsky. Be a gentleman. Can't you be a gentleman?"
"Oh, you don't love me," I would grunt
"I don't? I don't? I wish you would love me half as much," with a sigh. "If you did you would not behave the way you do. That's all your love amounts to—behaving like that. All men are hogs, after all." With which she would take to lecturing me and pouring out her infatuated heart in that solemn singsong of hers, which somewhat bored me