“If I stay, will you promise not to talk like that?”
“I don’t want you to stay under those circumstances.”
“You’re an insulting beast.”
“Not at all. I honour your womanhood by not pretending that it isn’t there.”
“Will you give me my gloves?”
She ran across and tried to snatch them out of his hand. He gripped and held her, and she gave a wild laugh as he kissed her.
She clung to him as he let her sink back into the great chair. She lay with her eyes closed and her lips parted while he sat and poured himself out another cup of tea. His hand was shaking so that he spilled some tea on his new rug.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll give you a week to get used to me, and if at the end of that time you don’t like me, you can go.”
“I haven’t any friends,” she said in a low voice, “and you get sick of girls and the shop. You get sick of going out in the evening up and down the streets and into the cinemas, and finding some damn fool to take you to a music-hall. Such a lot of people and nobody to know.”