He kissed her. She rested against him a second or two, her eyes shut, hot color flooding her smooth cheeks. Then abruptly she pushed herself away, sat plucking with nervous fingers at the folds of cloth across her knees.
"It doesn't lead there yet," she said shakily. "Perhaps not at all."
She rose to her feet. Rod followed up across the porch, cornered her against the wall.
"You do love me?" he challenged.
"Yes."
"Then why don't you marry me?"
"Because I do love you, Rod," she whispered. "Can't you see? It won't do. Oh, I can't explain. I haven't the words. But the unanswerable logic of it is clear in my mind. I knew we'd come to this. I've dreaded it. We can't go any farther. We'd both lose."
"That's not true. You know it isn't," he shook her roughly. "We're both thoroughbreds. It isn't class that counts. It's character. All the rest is just trimmings. If accident of birth made me a rich man's son, is that any reason why I shouldn't make my own way and my own place in the world if I have to choose between that and conforming to class prejudice in so important a thing as picking a wife? What sort of weak saphead do you think I am?"
"It's no good, Rod," she answered doggedly. "You simply don't understand. You've never had any experience of poverty, of struggle, of sordidness. You'd lose a lot that even money can't buy. And after a while you'd begin to wonder if it were worth while. The world well lost for love is a fine poetic fancy, but nothing more. I tell you quite frankly I'm afraid of love. It brings pain. It brings all sorts of bitter things to men and women, this mating passion. I have an instinct about these things. I won't marry you. I won't be carried away by any sort of feeling for you. I don't even want to see you again. What's the use? Oh, what's the use of our even thinking about it?"
She broke away from him with a wrench of her body. The door slammed behind her. He heard the quick patter of her feet on the uncarpeted floor. Then silence. Rod had a clairvoyant vision of her flinging herself on her bed, of her shoulders shaking, of sobs strangled in her throat. And he stood bewildered. What had seemed so simple had become disastrously complex, bearing implications of grief and pain and loneliness beyond his comprehension.