“What makes you think that?” she asked, with a tremor in her voice. She hadn’t intended any retreat from her earlier severity of tone. She prided herself on not being the sort of girl who would willingly show the white feather. But Gerry had touched on something which had been bewildering her, of late, more than she was ready to acknowledge.
“The things that have been happening around here,” he had the brutality to retort, “the things I’m now trying to straighten out for you!”
And remembering those things, the sense of her desolation returned to her double-fold. She walked to the window, looked out, and then turned slowly about. She was neither obtuse nor unsympathetic; she was merely a girl who had been prodigiously preoccupied with her fight for freedom and the depressing discovery that it was a losing fight.
“Oh, Gerry, what’s the matter with me, anyway?” she demanded with an altogether unlooked-for note of wistfulness in her voice.
“Don’t you know?” he said as he followed her to the window. “Don’t you know, you poor little muddle-headed kid?”
Teddie shook her head. She was rather foolishly afraid that Gerry was going to be sympathetic, and she didn’t want that, for sympathy, of late, seemed the inevitable overture to the unmusical opera of mushiness.
“I’ll tell you what’s the matter with you, Teddie,” asserted Gerry, wondering why she was refusing to meet his gaze. “You’re inflammatory without quite knowing it. You’re provocative, without being foolish enough to have fathomed the fact. The Lord made you so lovely, girl, that you put an ache in men’s hearts and a mist in front of their eyes. You make them forget themselves. And that’s why I’ve got to take you in hand.”
“Take me in hand?” repeated Teddie, standing up very straight and white.
“Yes, take you in hand,” repeated Gerry in turn.
“I rather think I’ve something to say about that!”