“Why aren’t you sure?” she asked, in her easy sing song. She was perfectly at her ease, perhaps even rather happy in this conversation. “You don’t really love him?”
Ursula flushed a little at the mild impertinence of this question. And yet she could not definitely take offence. Hermione seemed so calmly and sanely candid. After all, it was rather great to be able to be so sane.
“He says it isn’t love he wants,” she replied.
“What is it then?” Hermione was slow and level.
“He wants me really to accept him in marriage.”
Hermione was silent for some time, watching Ursula with slow, pensive eyes.
“Does he?” she said at length, without expression. Then, rousing, “And what is it you don’t want? You don’t want marriage?”
“No—I don’t—not really. I don’t want to give the sort of submission he insists on. He wants me to give myself up—and I simply don’t feel that I can do it.”
Again there was a long pause, before Hermione replied:
“Not if you don’t want to.” Then again there was silence. Hermione shuddered with a strange desire. Ah, if only he had asked her to subserve him, to be his slave! She shuddered with desire.