She tried to eliminate dislike and fear from her voice and spoke with a gentleness that she hoped would soften him. He heard it with a thrill; but it had an exactly contrary effect to what she had desired.
“I would like never to let you go. Just to hold you here and look at you. Mariposa, you don’t know what this love is I have for you. It grows with absence, and then when I see you it grows again with the sight of you. It’s eating into me like a poison. I can’t get away from it. You loved me once, why have you changed? What has come over you to take all that out of you? Is it because I made a foolish mistake? I’m ready to do anything you suggest—crawl in the dust, kneel now in the rain, and ask you to forgive it. Don’t be hard and revengeful. It’s not like you. Be kind, be merciful to a man who, if he said what hurt you, has repented it with all his soul ever since. I am ready to give you my whole life to make amends. Say you forgive me. Say you love me.”
He was speaking the truth. Passion had outrun cupidity. Mariposa, poor or rich, had become the end and aim of his existence.
“It’s not a question of forgiveness,” she answered, seeing he still persisted in the thought that she was hiding her love from wounded pride; “it’s not a question of love. I—I—don’t like you. Can’t you understand that? I don’t like you.”
“It’s not true—it’s not true,” he vociferated. “You love me—say you do.”
He shook her by the arm as though to shake the words out of her reluctant lips. The brutal roughness of the action spurred her from fear to indignation.
“It’s not love. It’s not even hate. It’s just repulsion and dislike. I can’t bear to look at you, or have you come near me, and to have you hold me, as you’re doing now, is as if some horrible thing, like a spider or a snake, was crawling on me.”
Amid the rustling and the splashing of the rain they again looked at each other for a fierce, pallid moment. Another drop of blood on his cheek detached itself and ran down. He had no free hand with which to wipe it off.
“Yet you’re going to marry me,” he said softly.
“I’ve heard enough of this,” she cried. “I’m not going to stand here talking to a madman. It’s early yet and these houses are full of people. If I give one cry every window will go up. I don’t want to make a scene here on the street, but if you detain me any longer talking in this crazy way, that’s what I’ll have to do.”