She was still drawing back, as if he was threatening her with something that would hurt. “I do’ want to.”
“But it was part of our bargain. You don’t understand that I couldn’t––”
“I didn’t make no such—” She checked herself. Her mother had rebuked her for this form of speech a thousand times. She said the sentence over as she felt he would have said it, as the people would have said it among whom she had lived as a child. The cadence of his speech, the half forgotten cadences of theirs, helped her ear and her intuitions. “I didn’t make any such bargain,” she managed to bring out, at last. “You said you’d give me money; but I never said I’d take it.”
He too rose. He began to feel troubled. Perhaps she wouldn’t be at his disposition after all. “But—but I couldn’t stand it if you didn’t let me––”
“And I couldn’t stand it if I did.”
“But that’s not reasonable. It’s part of the whole thing that I should look out for your future after what––”
“I know what you mean,” she declared, tremblingly. “You think that because I’m—I’m beneath you that I ain’t got—that I haven’t got—no sense of what a girl should do and what she shouldn’t do. But you’re 145 wrong. Do you suppose I didn’t know all about how crazy it was when I went with you yesterday? Of course I did. I was as much to blame as you.”
“Oh, no, you weren’t. Apart from your being what you call beneath me—and I don’t admit that you are—I’m a great deal older than you––”
“You’re only older in years. In livin’ I’m twice your age. Besides I’m all right here––” she touched her forehead again—“and I could see first thing that you was a fellow that needed to be took—to be taken—care of.”
“Oh, you did!”