"Yes, indeed. I feel quite different already."
"I hoped so. You are coming to your senses?"
"Perhaps. Only—" She laid a beautiful white pleading hand upon his shoulder and gazed earnestly into his eyes—"please don't frighten me with that talk—and those other kisses."
He looked at her uncertainly. "Come round in your own way," he said at last. "I don't want to hurry you. I suppose every bird has its own way of dropping from a perch."
"You don't like my way?" she inquired.
It was said archly but also in the way that always made him vaguely uneasy, made him feel like one facing a mystery which should be explored cautiously. "It is graceful," he admitted, with a smile since he could not venture to frown. "Graceful—but slow."
She laughed—and he could not but feel that the greater laughter in her too innocent eyes was directed at him. She talked of other things—and he let her—charmed, yet cursing his folly, his slavery, the while.
X
Many a time he had pitied a woman for letting him get away from her, when she obviously wished to hold him and failed solely because she did not understand her business. Like every other man, he no sooner began to be attracted by a woman than he began to invest her with a mystery and awe which she either could dissipate by forcing him to see the truth of her commonplaceness or could increase into a power that would enslave him by keeping him agitated and interested and ever satisfied yet ever baffled. But no woman had shown this supreme skill in the art of love—until Dorothy Hallowell. She exasperated him. She fascinated him. She kept him so restless that his professional work was all but neglected. Was it her skill? Was it her folly? Was she simply leading him on and on, guided blindly by woman's instinct to get as much as she could and to give as little as she dared? Or was she protected by a real indifference to him—the strongest, indeed the only invulnerable armor a woman can wear? Was she protecting herself? Or was it merely that he, weakened by his infatuation, was doing the protecting for her?