One last effort he made. Stooping, he picked up her hat.
"Shall we go now?" he said.
She swung in an instant's unsteadiness as she stood before him, but made no movement otherwise. One fear had gone in her, thrusting another in its place. Something terrified her now, a fear in her heart that over-rode all bodily fear.
If he should win in purpose now, the world were such an empty mockery of life as she well knew she had no strength to face. Hannah, Jane, Fanny, they might have survived the hollow meaninglessness of it all. They might have taken place in the senseless procession of Time, puppets of women, wasted lives in the thrusting crowd. Never could she fall in with them now.
Yet what was it she was struggling against? Something that had its purpose as well as she? Somehow she sensed it was the laws that men had made for the best of women to live by. He was attempting the best that was in him. But she had no pity for that. If love and contempt, passion and disgust can link in one, they met together in her then.
She never knew she thought all this. It was not in words she thought it. But those laws were wrong--all wrong. Possession was the very texture of them and all through the intricate fabric of life, she knew possession did not count. In instinct, reaching back, beyond the most distant consciousness of mind, she felt there was no possession in the world. No more would she belong to him than he to her. It was he who must give that which she most needed to take. And why had it resolved itself into this struggle, when all she had ever heard or known of men was nothing but the eagerness of passion to express desire?
These were not thoughts. Through all her substance they swept, a stream of voiceless impulses that had more power than words.
"We're not going now," she said in a strange quietness. "We didn't come here to go back. Not as we came."
Suddenly she put her hands upon his shoulders. He could feel her breath warm and though her voice was so close, it came from far away like the voices of the sirens calling which he knew would always call and which he knew a man must stop his ears and bind his limbs to resist.
"Do you want me to say it?" she whispered. "I'm yours--this moment I'm yours. For God's sake take me now."