“No, you don’t see,” he replied, “and it’s difficult for me to explain, because I don’t understand very well myself. Also the subject’s distasteful to me. But I owe it to you to try to explain.”
“I think you do,” she said icily.
He nodded, unimpressed by her tone. “It’s like this,” he went on, with an effort. “You’ve got to see me straight. And if I’m brutal, why, so much the better for you. I’m not only not the laurel-crowned knight of your flattering princess’s fancy. I’m not even the person I really was before I went away. Every bit of sweetness and light has been burned out of me. I don’t get delicate soft sensations out of anything any more. The overtones that you love don’t exist for me. Nothing has any glamour. All I can see in life is a mess of bare conflicting facts, stark naked.”
Stacey had forgotten Marian. His eyes glowed and there was a stern beauty in his face. Yet he was only leaning abhorrently over the upper edge of the well. He missed almost everything of importance.
While he spoke, the girl’s features had lost their expression of chill aloofness. Her lips were parted now, and she gazed at him as though fascinated.
“And if I tell you that I don’t love you,” he concluded fiercely, “I can honestly swear that it’s just that I don’t—can’t—love any one or anything. My saying so shouldn’t hurt anything but your pride, because you don’t love me, either.”
She leaned toward him ever so little. “How do you know I don’t love you?” she demanded softly.
“Because you create a setting, play a game, surround our meeting with little tricks,” he returned, quite unmoved by her coaxing grace.
She gazed at him intently, her breath coming and going rapidly. “Then you don’t—you truly don’t—even want to kiss me?” she asked.
He returned her gaze. Her coquetry did not stir him; her beauty did. “Yes,” he said somberly, “of course I do! But not because I find you shy and alluring. I don’t. Just because you’re beautiful and desire’s a fact.”