She was looking away from him. She was seated as if posing, her left elbow on her knee.
“Hilda, don’t my verses mean anything to you?”
“I like your rhymes very much—I have often wondered how you could think of all those rhymes—”
He was beside himself. So that was all his verses meant to her. They were well rhymed! They were mere beads strung on a string—not even a rosary!
“Why did you not write to me?—why didn’t you at least acknowledge the receipt of my poems?” There was a cry of humiliation in his voice.
She was silent for a moment. She knitted her brows as if studying how to put her thoughts into words. Then her face darkened; animation suddenly leaped into her sea-green eyes.
“And I have thought of you every moment,” he continued in a plaintive, reproachful tone, “and dreamed of you—and day-dreamed of you—” There was a spiteful smile around his lips as he added, “In my day-dreaming you could not shun me—you couldn’t push me away. You see, there is some advantage in being an imaginative poet even though you despise him—”
The color was rising in her face, her breast heaved. His words were like the suggestive passages in the novels she was forbidden to read but which she had read clandestinely.
“You must not say these things to me,” she presently said, catching her breath, her cheeks burning.
“Why shouldn’t I? I love you. I do not care who knows it. I lie awake in the darkness of my room visualizing your presence close to me. You can’t forbid my loving you—”