Culpepper watching her as she sat there, lovely and drooping and fair-haired, with her clear young profile partly averted, spoke, and watched anew to note the effect upon her of what he said.
"I concluded I'd keep away, Selina. I wasn't in the least satisfied with what you were giving me. I'm an outspoken brute. If there's no show that my share's going to be any more, I'll go on keeping away."
She shrank as though something had struck her. And in truth something had. Comprehension of what he meant, so far as knowledge went with her, the lightning flash of it stunned while it revealed.
Yet even as the poor child reeled pale with the shock, she rallied to her womanhood as she had had womanhood impressed on her. Courageously rallied! And bravely dissembled! A thing well-nigh synonymous with womanhood as taught to her!
Which is to say the child restored herself with a long, deep breath, laughed with a disarming little throw back to the head, swept her hands across the plaits she had so busily gathered there in the breadths of her dress, as though she swept away with these all but an everyday interpretation of Culpepper's word, and spoke frankly, frankness being a most excellent dissembling weapon.
"It's good to have you back, Culpepper." Her voice, traitorous at first, gained in composure. As said before it was a nice voice, and under conditions, full of cadences. When she was ten, Culpepper used to kiss her in her pretty neck to tickle her, because he liked these cadences when she laughed.
Meanwhile with the aid of that dissembling weapon, frankness, she was going on. "Don't stay away ever again. And, Oh, there's so much to ask you, and so much to tell you about!"
He looked across at her and her pretty dissembling and laughed. "You little goose! You haven't known me all this while to think you can put me off if I'm really ready?"
Her gaze at this was hurried, beseeching, pleading. It seemed to beg for time, respite, mercy!