“So that is a wolf,” said Cromartie, as they stopped six feet further on. “Another dog in a cage.... Give yourself to me, Josephine, that sounds to me as if you were crazy. But it shows anyway that you are not in love with me. If you are in love it is all or nothing. You cannot be in love with several people at once. I know because I am in love with you, and other people are all my enemies, necessarily my enemies.”
“What nonsense!” said Josephine.
“If I am in love with you,” Cromartie went on, “and you with me, it means that you are the only person who is not my enemy, and I am the only person who is not yours. A fool to give yourself to me! Yes, you are a fool if you fancy you are in love when you are not, and I should be a fool to believe it. You do not give yourself to the person with whom you are in love, you are yourself instead of being dressed up in armoured plate.”
“Has this place got nothing in it besides tame dogs?” asked Josephine.
They walked together towards the lion house, and Josephine took John’s arm in hers. “Armoured plate. It doesn’t seem to me to make sense. I cannot bear to hurt the people I love, and so I am not going to live with you, or do anything that they would mind if they found out.”
John said nothing to this, only shrugged his shoulders, screwed up his eyes, and rubbed his nose. In the lion house they walked slowly from cage to cage until they came to a tiger which walked up and down, up and down, up and down, turning his great painted head with intolerable familiarity, and with his whiskers just brushing the brick wall.
“They pay for their beauty, poor beasts,” said John, after a pause. “And you know it proves what I’ve been saying. Mankind want to catch anything beautiful and shut it up, and then come in thousands to watch it die by inches. That’s why one hides what one is and lives behind a mask in secret.”
“I hate you, John, and all your ideas. I love my fellow creatures—or most of them—and I can’t help it if you are a tiger and not a human being. I’m not mad; I can trust people with every feeling I have got, and I shall never have any feelings that I shouldn’t like to share with everybody. I don’t mind if I am a Christian—it’s better than suffering from persecution mania, and browbeating me because I’m fond of my father and Aunt Eily.”
But Miss Lackett did not look very browbeaten as she said this. On the contrary her eyes sparkled, her colour was high and her looks imperious, and she kept tapping the toe of her pointed shoe on the stone floor. Mr. Cromartie was irritated by this tapping, so he said something in a low voice on purpose so that Josephine should not be able to hear it; the only word audible was “browbeating.”
She asked him very savagely what he had said. John laughed. “What’s the use of my talking to you at all if you fly into a rage before you have even heard what I have got to say?” he asked her.