“I shall ask nothing of you that you are not ready freely to give,” I said.
Impulsively she stood and put out her hand, and the eyes she lifted to mine were shining and friendly. I caught her in my arms and kissed her—not once but many times. And it was not until the chill of her ice-like face had cooled me that I released her, drew back red and ashamed and stammering apologies. But her impulse of friendliness had been killed; she once more, as I saw only too plainly, felt for me that sense of repulsion, felt for herself that sense of self-degradation.
“I can not marry you!” she muttered.
“You can—and will—and must,” I cried, infuriated by her look.
There was a long silence. I could easily guess what was being fought out in her mind. At last she slowly drew herself up. “I can not refuse,” she said, and her eyes sparkled with defiance that had hate in it. “You have the power to compel me. Use it, like the brute you refuse to let me forget that you are.” She looked so young, so beautiful, so angry—and so tempting.
“So I shall!” I answered. “Children have to be taught what is good for them. Call in your mother, and we'll tell her the news.”
Instead, she went into the next room. I followed, saw Mrs. Ellersly seated at the tea-table in the corner farthest from the library where her daughter and I had been negotiating. She was reading a letter, holding her lorgnon up to her painted eyes.
“Won't you give us tea, mother?” said Anita, on her surface not a trace of the cyclone that must still have been raging hi her.
“Congratulate me, Mrs. Ellersly,” said I. “Your daughter has consented to marry me.”
Instead of speaking, Mrs. Ellersly began to cry—real tears. And for a moment I thought there was a real heart inside of her somewhere. But when she spoke, that delusion vanished.