“No, I wasn’t,” she said. “I was wondering what it is about the country that makes it seem so terrible?”
“It’s your being a Puritan—a tight-laced delightful little Puritan.”
She winced at the words, and decided to remain silent.
It was true, Straussmann was in a fever of excitement—he was always this way with women, especially with Emma. He tried to conceal it for the time being, thinking, rightly, that a display of it would not please her just at the moment—“but it would be only a matter of minutes when she would welcome it,” he promised himself, and waited.
He reflected that she would laugh at him. “But she would enjoy it just the same. The way with all women who have had anything to do with more than one man and are not yet forty,” he reflected. “They like what they get, but they laugh at you, and know you are lying——”
“Oh, my God!” Emma said suddenly, drawing her arm away and wiping her face with her handkerchief.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, it’s the heat.”
“It is warm,” he said dismally.
“I despise everything, I really despise everything, but you won’t believe—— I mean everything when I say everything—you’ll think I mean some one thing—won’t you?” she went on hurriedly. She felt that she was becoming hysterical.