“About as much as you love her,” she said, with an unaffected laugh; “only he don't wind me around his finger.”
No doubt she was right for all her thoughtlessness, and yet he was going to fight about that woman to-morrow! No—he forgot; he was going to fight Captain Pinckney because he was like her!
Susy had put her finger on the crease between his brows which this supposition had made, and tried to rub it out.
“You know it as well as I do, Clarence,” she said, with a pretty wrinkling of her own brows, which was her nearest approach to thoughtfulness. “You know you never really liked her, only you thought her ways were grander and more proper than mine, and you know you were always a little bit of a snob and a prig too—dear boy. And Mrs. Peyton was—bless my soul!—a Benham and a planter's daughter, and I—I was only a picked-up orphan! That's where Jim is better than you—now sit still, goosey!—even if I don't like him as much. Oh, I know what you're always thinking, you're thinking we're both exaggerated and theatrical, ain't you? But don't you think it's a heap better to be exaggerated and theatrical about things that are just sentimental and romantic than to be so awfully possessed and overcome about things that are only real? There, you needn't stare at me so! It's true. You've had your fill of grandeur and propriety, and—here you are. And,” she added with a little chuckle, as she tucked up her feet and leaned a little closer to him, “here's ME.”
He did not speak, but his arm quite unconsciously passed round her small waist.
“You see, Clarence,” she went on with equal unconsciousness of the act, “you ought never to have let me go—never! You ought to have kept me here—or run away with me. And you oughtn't to have tried to make me proper. And you oughtn't to have driven me to flirt with that horrid Spaniard, and you oughtn't to have been so horribly cold and severe when I did. And you oughtn't to have made me take up with Jim, who was the only one who thought me his equal. I might have been very silly and capricious; I might have been very vain, but my vanity isn't a bit worse than your pride; my love of praise and applause in the theatre isn't a bit more horrid than your fears of what people might think of you or me. That's gospel truth, isn't it, Clarence? Tell me! Don't look that way and this—look at ME! I ain't poisonous, Clarence. Why, one of your cheeks is redder than the other, Clarence; that's the one that's turned from me. Come,” she went on, taking the lapels of his coat between her hands and half shaking him, half drawing him nearer her bright face. “Tell me—isn't it true?”
“I was thinking of you just now when I fell asleep, Susy,” he said. He did not know why he said it; he had not intended to tell her, he had only meant to avoid a direct answer to her question; yet even now he went on. “And I thought of you when I was out there in the rose garden waiting to come in here.”
“You did?” she said, drawing in her breath. A wave of delicate pink color came up to her very eyes, it seemed to him as quickly and as innocently as when she was a girl. “And what DID you think, Klarns,” she half whispered—“tell me.”
He did not speak, but answered her blue eyes and then her lips, as her arms slipped quite naturally around his neck.