So here it was again, the thing she had been running away from. It had outwitted and outrun her, meeting her again just at the instant when she thought she was shaking it off. She was so indignant with the thing that she almost overlooked the man. She too swung round from her end of the bench, so that they confronted each other, with the length of the seat between them. It was her habit to put things plainly, though now she did it with a burning heart.
“This is the way you mean it, isn’t it?—you’d go to the devil because you’d married me.”
The half-minute before he answered was occupied not merely in thinking what to say but in noticing, now that he had her in full-face, that her large, brown irises seemed to be sprinkled with gold dust. Otherwise her appearance struck him simply as blurred, as if 39 it had been brightly enough drawn as to color and line, only rubbed over and defaced by the hand of misery.
“I don’t want you to get me wrong,” he explained. “It’s not a question of my marrying you in particular. I’ve said I’d marry the first girl I met who’d marry me.”
The gold-brown eyes scintillated with a thousand tiny stars. “Say, and am I the first?”
“No; you’re the fourth.” He added, so that she should be under no misconception as to what he was about: “You can take me or leave me. That’s up to you. But if you take me, I want you to understand that it’ll be on a purely business basis.”
She repeated, as if to memorize the words, “A purely business basis.”
“Exactly. I’m not looking for a wife. I only want a woman to marry—a woman to whom I can point and say, See there! I’ve married—that.”
“And that’d be me.”
“If you undertook the job.”