He paused, looking at her. Her profile was toward him, pale and immovable. She neither turned nor spoke. He continued with a slight diminution of confidence:
“I’ve been a wild sort of fellow, consorting with all sorts of riffraff and thinking lightly of women. I’ve met lots of all kinds. It was all right to talk to them that way. You were different. I knew it from the first. But that night in the cottage I lost my head. You looked so pale and sad; my love broke the bonds I had put upon it. Can’t you understand and forgive me?”
He leaned toward her, his face tense and pale. As he became agitated and fell into the position of pleader, she grew calm and regained her hold on herself. There was a chill poise about her that frightened him. He felt that if he attempted to touch her she would draw away with quick, instinctive repugnance.
She turned and looked into his face with cold eyes.
“No, I don’t think I understand. I should think those very things you mention would appeal to the chivalry of a man even if he didn’t care for a woman.”
“Do you doubt that I love you?”
“Yes,” she said, turning away; “I don’t think that you ever could love me or any other woman.”
“Why do you say that?”
She looked out over the grassy slope in front of them.
“Because you don’t understand the first principles of it. When you’re fond of people you don’t want to hurt and humiliate them. You don’t want to drag them down to shame and misery. You’d die to save them from those things. You want to protect them, help them, take care of them, be proud of them and say to all the world: ‘Here, look; this is the person I love!’”