“As you like—afterward.”
“Afterward?”
“Very well, a common soldier.”
He sensed something strange in her voice, a sort of irony, and it took the patience out of him:
“I have always been common, I could commit crimes, easily, gladly—I’d like to!”
She looked away. “That’s natural,” she said faintly; “it’s an instinct all strong men have——”
She knew what was troubling him, thwarted instincts, common beautiful instincts that he was being robbed of. He wanted to do something final to prove his lower order; caught himself making faces, idiot faces, and she laughed.
“If only your ears stuck out, chin receded,” she said, “you might look degenerate, common, but as it is——”
And he would creep away in hat, coat and with his cane, to peer at his horses, never daring to go in near them. Sometimes, when he wanted to weep, he would smear one glove with harness grease, but the other one he held behind his back, pretending one was enough to prove his revolt.
She would torment him with vases, books, pictures, making a fool of him gently, persistently, making him doubt by cruel means, the means of objects he was not used to, eternally taking him out of his sphere.