"Perhaps it is his duty to go where he is most needed—where his riper instincts and experience—"
"Your arguments are always good, otherwise I should not be here arguing with you. What do you really think of love?"
She jumped with the suddeness of the attack, and then drew backward a little, for he was leaning towards her and she felt his masculine magnetism as she had never done before. It pulled and repelled her, fascinated and filled her with resentment. And she was fully alive to the romantic conditions, the wild night, the isolation, the vibrating atmosphere. But she replied, soberly:
"I don't think about it. I buried all that—"
"Chuck it on the dust-heap! It served its purpose: women should have some such experience in their first youth as men have others. You are the better for it, because you worked off on the poor devil all the morbid and ultra-romantic tendencies that were spoiling your life. But let it go at that. It was no more love than my first Byronic madness for one of my mother's friends when I was sixteen—"
"You were thirty when you were in love with Mrs. Kaye. And she was not even your second—nor your tenth, no doubt."
"Quite right. I do not understand and shall waste no time on the effort. All men run pretty much the same gamut. That attack was the most commonplace sort of passion, no madness in it, no idealization, no sense of mating—"
"And how, may I ask, do you expect to know when you really do fall in love—"
"I'll know, all right. I wish you would put up your hair. You look uncanny, not like a woman at all. You have too many sides. I like you when you are human and normal."
"If you think my hair in its proper place will accomplish that result—my hair-pins are up-stairs on my dressing-table—"