“Glad you like your own taste,” said I awkwardly. “You know, Alva told me.”
“But it's one thing to dream, and a very different thing to do,” she answered. Then, with smiling reproach: “And I've been thinking all summer that you were ruined! I've been expecting to hear every day that you had had to give up the fight.”
“Oh—that passed long ago,” said I.
“But you never told me,” she reminded me. “And I'm glad you didn't,” she added. “Not knowing saved me from doing something very foolish.” She reddened a little, smiled a great deal, dazzlingly, was altogether different from the ice-locked Anita of a short time before, different as June from January. And her hand—so intensely alive—seemed extremely comfortable in mine.
Even as my blood responded to that electric touch, I had a twinge of cynical bitterness. Yes, apparently I was at last getting what I had so long, so vainly, and, latterly, so hopelessly craved. But—why was she giving it? Why had she withheld herself until this moment of material happiness? “I have to pay the rich man's price,” thought I, with a sigh.
It was in reaching out for some sweetness to take away this bitter taste in my honey that I said to her, “When you gave me that money from your uncle, you did it to help me out?”
She colored deeply. “How silly you must have thought me!” she answered.
I took her other hand. As I was drawing her toward me, the sudden pallor of her face and chill of her hands halted me once more, brought sickeningly before me the early days of my courtship when she had infuriated my pride by trying to be “submissive.” I looked round the room—that room into which I had put so much thought—and money. Money! “The rich man's price!” those delicately brocaded walls shimmered mockingly at me.
“Anita,” said I, “do you care for me?”
She murmured inaudibly. Evasion! thought I, and suspicion sprang on guard, bristling.