“We were talking of me” I answered. “Of the subject that interests you not at all.”
She looked at me in a forlorn sort of way that softened my irritation with sympathy. “I've told you how it is with me,” she said. “I do my best to please you. I—”
“Damn your best!” I cried. “Don't try to please me. Be yourself. I'm no slave-driver. I don't have to be conciliated. Can't you ever see that I'm not your tyrant? Do I treat you as any other man would feel he had the right to treat the girl who had engaged herself to him? Do I ever thrust my feelings or wishes—or—longings on you? And do you think repression easy for a man of my temperament?”
“You have been very good,” she said humbly.
“Don't you ever say that to me again,” I half commanded, half pleaded. “I won't have you always putting me in the position of a kind and indulgent master.”
She halted and faced me.
“Why do you want me, anyhow?” she cried. Then she noticed several loungers on a bench staring at us and grinning; she flushed and walked on.
“I don't know,” said I. “Because I'm a fool, probably. My common sense tells me I can't hope to break through that shell of self-complacence you've been cased in by your family and your associates. Sometimes I think I'm mistaken in you, think there isn't any real, human blood left in your veins, that you're like the rest of them—a human body whose heart and mind have been taken out and a machine substituted—a machine that can say and do only a narrow little range of conventional things—like one of those French dolls.”
“You mustn't blame me for that,” she said gently. “I realize it, too—and I'm ashamed of it. But—if you could know how I've been educated. They've treated me as the Flathead Indian women treat their babies—keep their skulls in a press—isn't that it?—until their heads and brains grow of the Flathead pattern. Only, somehow, in my case—the process wasn't quite complete. And so, instead of being contented like the other Flathead girls, I'm—almost a rebel, at times. I'm neither the one thing nor the other—not natural and not Flathead, not enough natural to grow away from Flathead, not enough Flathead to get rid of the natural.”
“I take back what I said about not knowing why I—I want you, Anita,” I said. “I do know why—and—well, as I told you before, you'll never regret marrying me.”