“Why don’t you curse me?” she asked presently. “I doubt if you have any feelings. Why don’t you simply kill me for what I said?”
“In the first place,” he smiled, “I don’t think you quite meant it.”
“Oh, but I did,” she affirmed. “I really did.”
“Come on,” he said in a lighter tone, catching her hand and starting down the second flight of steps. “If I were to kill you, Freda MacDowell, it would be a tough little world for me to go on living in.”
“Anyway,” he added, drawing her gently along as she made to grasp the railing. “I certainly did use you rottenly last week. I can see now how you felt, and as for that dance and our friend, Courtney, well—I’m not going to be so miserably jealous any more.”
The edge of Freda’s knife-like mood was dulled a little by his words, and she followed him with a sense of defeat. It was becoming her ambition to see this big fellow angry. Why a woman should desire such a sight, and desire it like a fetish, is one of the obscure phenomena of feminine psychology. To say that anger reveals new qualities of the man is to give but a paltry explanation. During the little canoe journey along under the eastern shore of Lockwood, Freda kept thinking of Gertrude Manton’s apothegm: “We don’t know why our love makes us hurt them. They are only men, but we are women.” But had Gertrude really managed to hurt them? That was the question. If so, unbounded praise! As for herself, Freda was ignobly defeated. The man at whose sure stroke her canoe glided so sleekly under the shadowy cliffs was surely incapable of anger.