The flying boy, rather pale but with a smile in his eyes, told her that he had ordered coffee for her and himself to be brought into the lounge, since all the other people seemed to be drifting into the salon after dinner. In the further corner of that lounge, under an artificial-looking palm, he drew up for her a wicker-chair.
"Sit down there!" he ordered her with a new masterfulness in his husky charming voice. "And listen to me. You'll sit there until you've given me the answer that I want."
She sat, leaning back, lax and graceful.
He fastened his eyes upon her.
She could not meet them, but she was aware of every line of his face, printed upon her heart. She loved him. She did not deny to herself that she had come to love every look and every tone of him; and the facts that their mental outlook must be different and that her own experience, her wider knowledge must yawn as a gulf between them did not lessen his attraction for her, as it might have done for another woman. Claudia Cartwright had often smiled when she heard certain prattlers of her own sex avow their demand to have "their mentality fed, and their need of being in perfect intellectual sympathy" with the men (sometimes elderly men) whom they married.
In Mrs. Cartwright, as we know, the sense of physical perfection was better developed ... the worse for her, all the worse for her now.
Jack Awdas, standing over her, was saying, "I can't go on like this, you know. You've got to have me, or I've got to get away. It's come to that."
Her heart, it seemed to her, seemed to miss a beat at this, then to beat faster as she sat there. She shook her head, almost abstractedly, for her thoughts were racing ahead of the words she would have tried to frame. They were slipping from her, those wise and too true arguments to which she had submitted, alone in her own room and without his eyes upon her, disarming her of all her wisdom. Instinct within her clamoured, "But I love him so! I want him!"
She ought to be upstairs now, she knew, packing those bags for dear life.
She ground the heel of her slender slipper into the floor of the lounge before her as she thought of this, and she thought, "Ah, if marriage were for a year, say! Then!... If I could marry him and die before he began to tire—even his mother would not hate me then." Then came the breath-taking thought, "He will be flying again presently. He may crash again.... Ah!..." This was unendurable. She thrust it from her to think, "For a time I could make him gloriously happy! Happier than any girl alive has power to do——"