“So are you. But being beautiful isn’t everything. Being loved is the thing that satisfies.”
“Does it? And loving too, I expect. But you see I don’t know: I’ve never loved.”
“You won’t let yourself love.” He spoke the words almost inaudibly.
They both fell silent. She still bent forward, her head and shoulders silhouetted against the pane. Her lack of response made his passion seem foolishness.
During the weeks of enforced friendship the physical bond between them had been growing more compelling.
It was only in crowded places that her actions acknowledged it; when they were by themselves her reticence announced plainly, “Trespassers will be prosecuted.” Then she became forbidding; but her sudden gusts of coldness, her very inaccessibility, only added the more to her attraction. He told himself that women who left men nothing to conquer were not valued. He found himself filled with overpowering longings to defy her attempts to thwart him. His mind seethed with pictures of what might happen. He saw himself pressing those hands against his lips, kissing her eyes or her slender neck, where the false curl danced and beckoned. Would this pain of expectancy never end? Did she also suffer beneath her pale aloofness?
With the high-strung sensitiveness of the lover, he began to suspect that his procrastination piqued her. Sometimes he fancied that even Vashti criticized his delay in announcing his intentions. He dreaded lest Desire should think that he was flirting. But why didn’t she help him? Did girls ever help their lovers? She increased his difficulties at every opportunity. Shyness, perhaps! Time and again when he had nerved himself to the point of proposing, she had struck him dumb with a languid triviality or flippancy of gesture.
But to-night it would be different The enchantment of the snow tingled in his blood. The warning of the woman who had procrastinated so long that she had lost her sincerity, spurred him to confession. Surely to-night, if ever——
His hand set out on a voyage of discovery. It slipped into her muff and found her fingers.
She shuddered. It was as though a chill had struck her. “What are you doing? You’re queer to-night. Funny.”