“I must have until—until this evening,” she said in a low voice and with an effort. “I—I thought you had gone—for good and all—and I tried to put you out of my thoughts.”
She was standing near him and he crushed her in his arms. “You must, you must,” he exclaimed. “I must have you.”
She let him kiss her once, then pushed him away, hiding her face in no mere pretence of modesty and maidenly repulsion. “This evening,” she said, almost flying from him.
She paused at the door of her mother’s sitting-room. From it came the odor of drugs, and in it were all the evidences of the tedious companionship of her poverty-stricken prison life—the invalid chair with its upholstery tattering; the worn carpet; the wall paper stained, and in one corner giving way because of a leak which they had no money to repair; the table with its litter of bottles, of drug-boxes, of patent-medicine advertisements and trashy novels; in the bed the hypochondriac herself, old, yellow, fat in an unhealthy way, with her empty, childish, peevish face.
Emily did not enter, but went on to her own room—bare, cheerless, proofs of poverty and impending rags and patches threatening to obtrude. She looked out through the trees at the glimpses of the town—every beat of the pulse of her youth was a sullen and hateful protest against it. Beyond were the tall chimneys of the mills, with the black clouds from them smutching the sky—there lived the work-people, the boredom of the town driving them to brutal dissipation.
“I must! I must!” she said, between her set teeth, then sank down in the window seat and buried her face in her arms.
That evening she accepted him, and the next morning her mother announced the engagement to the first caller.
CHAPTER V.
THE PENITENT PIRATE.
WAYLAND had the commercial instinct too strongly developed not to fear that he was paying an exorbitant price for a fancy which would probably be as passing as it was powerful. Whenever Emily was not before his eyes he was pushing the bill angrily aside. But in the stubbornness of self-indulgence he refused to permit himself to see that he was making a fool of himself. If she had not gauged him accurately, or, rather, if she had not mentally and visibly shrunk even from the contact with him necessary to shaking hands, he might quickly have come to his cool-blooded senses. But their engagement made no change in their relations. Her mother’s illness helped her to avoid seeing him for more than a few minutes at a time. Her affectation of an extreme of prudery—with inclination and policy reinforcing each the other—made her continue to keep herself as elusive, as tantalising to him as she had been at that dinner when he “fell head over heels in love—” so he described it to her. And he thoroughly approved of her primness. For, to him there were only two classes of women—good women, those who knew nothing; bad women, those who knew and, knowing, must of necessity feel and act as coarsely as himself. The most of the time which he believed she was devoting to her mother, she was passing in her room in arguing the two questions: “How can I give him up? How can I marry him?”
Her acute intelligence did not permit her to deceive herself. She knew with just what kind of man she was dealing, knew she would continue to loathe him after she had married him, knew her reason for marrying him was as base, if not baser, than his reason for marrying her. “He is at least a purchaser,” she said to herself contemptuously, “while I am merely the thing purchased.” And her conduct was condemned by her whole nature except the one potent instinct of feminine laziness. “If only I had been taught to work,” she thought “or taught not to look down upon work! Yet how could it be so low as this?”