“It is too much, indeed,” she said. And then suddenly she held out entreating hands, her eyes brimming.
“Philip, I could forgive you that—even that—it was before you knew me—if only you would be to me again what you seemed. Will you, Philip? If any suspicion of my learning and resenting the truth has caused this coldness in you, keeping you aloof in your pride, O, forget it! I am not exacting; I know what men must be. Say only that you hold me in your true heart above that—that woman, and I will pardon you everything. Philip, before it is too late!”
He started furiously to his feet, flinging the book in his hand away from him.
“Pardon! Too late! That threat again! Zounds, madam, you presume. I neither guess nor heed your meaning. I cherish an image, do I? Very well, I cherish it. As to yourself, you are distasteful to me. For what reason? Simply because you are you—no other in the world, I assure you. And, if that is not enough——”
He stopped, checked in the midst of his wrath by the look in the eyes before him. It was not submission or fright; it was the spark of a new amazed dawn. That he had said the thing he could never recall occurred to him suddenly with an odd sick qualm. He tried to recover the thread of his discourse, but only to have it tail off into inarticulate stammerings.
“Enough?” she said in a low voice. “O, truly—and to spare. Distasteful! Am I that to you? Why, so are all sweets to the carrion-loving dog. Well, I am well content to have your loathing, sir. Will you please be gone: there is nothing noisome here to tempt your palate. Distasteful!” She took a step forward, a single one, and his eyes flickered. He thought, perhaps, she was going to strike him. “Now, listen to this,” she said. “I will never, before God, utter word to you again till you have gone down on your knees to me and asked my pardon for that insult.”
She turned her shoulder on him and walked apart. He watched her, lowering, and forced a laugh he meant for one of mockery.
“Silence between us!” he said. “Be assured I make a second, madam, in that welcome compact.”
He sat down again, and, picking up his book, affected to become absorbed in it. But all the time his pulses were thumping and his eyes furtively conning the rebel over the leaf edges. A spot of bright colour was on her cheek; she trilled a little air, as she seated herself in her former position, as naturally and light-heartedly as if she had never a trouble in the world. “Damn her!” he thought. “To take the upper hand of me like that!” His fury heaved and fermented in him like yeast in a dough-pan. He sneered at her pretence of cheerful abstraction. “She is thinking of me,” he reflected, “as I am of her.”
He tried to escape her image, to get genuinely interested in his book; but his indignation—and something else, that qualmish something—would always come between. To be faced and flouted by this bantling, adjudged and sentenced of her furious young disdain! It was intolerable—not to be endured. A dozen times he twitched, on the verge of an explosion, and a dozen times, with an ever-diminishing heat, restrained himself. It was true enough, he thought, as his fume evaporated, that he had not condescended to tact in his repulse of her. Diplomatically, at least, he should have been more tender of her feelings, have attained his end more surely without brutality. She had some reason for her resentment; and he must admit she had looked well in expressing it. A clear conscience burned with a clear fire, and there was something cleanly piquant in the warmth it emitted. It gave his arid veins a new sensation. Comparing those immature lines with the fuller which had hitherto besotted his fancy, he found a curious interest in studying them. It was like extracting a fresh, slender, white kernel from its grosser husk—a sweet and rather tasty discovery. Had his eyes been at fault, and his palate? Infatuation, perhaps, had blinded the one and cloyed the other. Well, he might come yet to humour this situation—even to atone in some measure for the unkindness of which he had been guilty. But not at once! She must be taught her little lesson before he could afford to unbend. She was really a pretty child, when all was said and done—a brunette, with large blue eyes appealing and alluring, and a complexion like china roses. The rest, did he choose to will it, should come to ripen in the sun of love, like a peach hung on a wall. There was a thrill in the sense of that power possessed and withheld. With a sigh that was half a new rapture, he turned resolutely to his reading.