Up went his head, with that little unconscious toss of the chin, and Dora half laughed to hear how at this moment he seemed to put Bach and supper on quite the same level, when there was the prospect of strolling with her outside. There was intense sweetness to her in that, and there was mastery also, which she loved. She felt that even if she had not cared for him, and even if she was particularly hungry, she would have to go with him. But as she rose she could not help commenting on this, wanting, woman-like, to hear the reply that her heart had already shouted to her.
“You speak as if Bach and supper were equally unimportant,” she said.
“Of course. There’s not a pin to choose between them, if you’ll just come out with me.”
“And if I won’t?”
“But you will,” he said.
“Not even, ‘please’?”
He shook his head.
“Anything sooner than ‘please,’” he said. “Come or not just as you like.”
To Dora this was tremendously attractive: the absolute refusal to ask anything of her as a favour, even when he so intensely wanted it, was a revelation of the eternal masculine not opposed to but in accord with the eternal feminine. Nothing seemed to her more fantastic and sickly than the sort of devotion that begged for a flower, and sighed and pined under a woman’s unkindness or caprice. “Here is my heart,” he had in effect said to her, “take it or leave it, but if you take it give me yours.” Man gave, and was not woman to give too, in her own kind? She, too, longed to come out into the warm half-darkness of the stars with him, and why, in common fairness, should he be supposed to sue for a favour that which she longed to grant?
So out they went on to the dim-paved terrace walk. Above the sky was clear and the star-dust strewn thick over the floor of the heaven, and the fantastic shape of the birds on the yew hedge stood clear out against the luminous and velvet blue. A little draught of flower-scented air stole up through the square doorways in the hedge from the drowsy beds, that but dreamed of their daylight fragrance, and somewhere not far away in the park a night jar throbbed its bourdon note, making vibration rather than sound. Dora put her hand through his arm and laughed.