"Mayn't I look?" he said. "I don't believe you are scarlet. Besides, I have to say I am sorry. I can't say I am sorry to the carpet."
Jeannie paused for a moment before she replied; something in his voice, though still she could not see his face clearly, startled her. It sounded changed, somehow, full of something suppressed, something serious. But she could not risk a second fiasco; she had to play her high cards out, and hope for their triumph.
"You needn't say it," she said. "And so let us pass to what I suggested, and what you would have made, you told me, a condition of your forgiving me. Friendship! What a beautiful word in itself, and what a big one! And how little most people mean by it. A man says he is a woman's friend because he lunches with her once a month; a woman says she is a man's friend because they have taken a drive round Hyde Park in the middle of the afternoon!"
Jeannie sat more upright in her chair, leaning forward towards him. Then she saw him more clearly, and the hunger of his face, the bright shining of his eyes, endorsed what she had heard in his voice. Yet she was not certain—not quite certain.
"Oh, I don't believe we most of us understand friendship at all," she said. "It is not characteristic of our race to let ourselves feel. Most English people neither hate nor love, nor make friends in earnest. I think one has to go South—South and East—to find hate and love and friends, just as one has to go South to find the sun. Do you know the Persian poet and what he says of his friend:
'A book of verses underneath the bough,
A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness,
The wilderness were paradise enow.'
Ah, that is more my notion of friendship, of the ideal of friendship, the thing that makes Paradise of the desert."
He got up quickly and stood before her, speaking hoarsely and quickly.
"It does not matter what you call it," he said. "I know what you mean. I call it love, that is all—Jeannie, Jeannie——"
He seized both her hands in his roughly, brutally almost, and covered them with kisses.