Patricia was astounded. She turned sharply, her lips parted in amazement. He was in earnest. His words made her heart race. Then anger came—and again shame—and an emotion which she did not analyse.
"Marry? When.... Don't be ridiculous!" cried Patricia.
Edgar looked down at her, apparently as grave and unmoved as before, although his voice was changed.
"Why not?" he asked. "I'm in love with you. Will you marry me?"
Patricia laughed, almost savagely. She was deeply moved, and her present emotion, in conflict with all she had been feeling so recently, made her voice loud and angry, as if she were afraid.
"Love me ... I don't feel that you love me," she said with bitterness. "Something quite different. I feel that you're interested in me——"
"Well, I should hope so!" cried Edgar, apparently amazed. "Isn't that essential?"
"And I don't love you," said Patricia, vehemently. "I don't!" She was still emphatically protesting. "I respect you. I think you're ... I think you're everything that's kind and ... inhuman." She was trying to remain calm, to equal his restraint with her own; and she was failing. The failure gave her a passionate sense of inferiority to him that was intolerable. Suddenly she began to cry, her hands outstretched helplessly before her. "It's no good.... It's no good!" she sobbed through her tears, her little face distorted with the torment of her heart. "I'm ... an awful ... beast!"
Edgar took the outstretched hands in his own, dropping to one knee in order to do so. He was so gentle, so extraordinarily inviting of trust and sincerity and goodness, that Patricia's head came forward for the merest instant, and touched his shoulder, as if there to find relief from her own suffering.
"Do think of it," he urged, his face so near her own, so comprehending, so full of love. "Patricia ...."