A second and a third call, a drive and several long walks; still he had done nothing to further his scheme. He put off his return to New York, seeing her every day, each time in a fresh aspect of beauty, in a new mood of fascination. One night, a month after he met her at church, he found her alone on the wide piazza. She was in an evening dress, white, clinging close to her, following her every movement. He soon reached his limit of endurance.
“You are maddening,” he said abruptly, stretching out his arms to seize her. He thrust her wraps violently away from her throat and one shoulder. He was crushing her against his chest, was kissing her savagely.
She wrenched herself away from him, panting with anger, with repulsion. But he thought it was a return of his ardour, and she did not undeceive him. “You mustn’t!” she said. “You know that it is impossible. You must go. Good-night!”
She left him and he, after waiting uncertainly a few moments, went slowly down the drive, in a rage, but a rage in which anger and longing were curiously mingled. When he called the next day, she was “not at home.” When he called again she could not come down, she must stay beside her mother, who had had another attack, so the servant explained in a stammering, unconvincing manner. He wrote that he wished to see her to say good-bye as he was leaving the next day. Then he called and she came into the parlour—“just for an instant.” She was wearing a loose gown, open at the throat, with sleeves falling away from her arms. Her small feet were thrust into a pair of high-heeled red slippers and her stockings had openwork over the ankles. She seemed so worried about her mother that it was impossible for him to re-open the one subject and resume progress, as he had hoped to do. But it was not impossible for him to think. And Emily, anxiously watching him from behind her secure entrenchments, noted that he was thinking as she wished and hoped. His looks, his voice encouraged her to play her game, her only possible game, courageously to the last card.
“If he doesn’t come back,” she thought, “at least I’ve done my best. And I think he will come.”
She sent him away regretfully, but immediately, standing two steps up the stairway in a final effective pose. He set his teeth together and took the train for New York. There he outdid all his previous impulses of extravagant generosity with himself, but he could not drive her from his mind. Those who formerly amused him, now seemed vulgar, silly, and stale. They made her live the more vividly in his imagination. Business gave him no relief. At his office his mind wandered to her, and the memory of that stolen kiss made his nerves quiver and hot flushes course over and through him. At the end of three weeks, he returned to Stoughton. “I’ve let myself go crazy,” he thought, “I’ll see her again and convince myself that I’m a fool.”
As he neared her house, his mind became more at ease. When he rang the bell he was laughing at himself for having got into such a frenzy over “nothing but a woman like the rest of ’em.” But as soon as he saw her, he was drunk again.
“I love you,” he stammered. “I can’t do without you. Will you—will you marry me, Emily?”
There was no triumph either in her face or in her mind. She was hearing the hammer smash in the thick walls of her prison, but she shrank from the sound. As she looked at his commonplace, heavy-featured face; as she listened to his monotonous voice, with its hint of tyranny and temper; as she felt his greedy eyes and hot, trembling fingers;—a revulsion swept over her and left her sick with disgust—disgust for her despicable self, loathing for him and for his feeling for her—his “love.”
“How can I?” she thought, turning away to hide her expression from him. “How can I? And yet, how can I refuse?”