She could not answer him. She could not say what she felt. The woods, the Heath, and—this; the rattle and smell of the street, the dinginess of the studio, the dinginess of his soul—the dinginess and yet the fire of it. On the Heath he had been like a faun, prick-eared and shaggy, but wild and free as her spirit was wild and free. Here he was rough, coarse, harsh, and tyrannical. She could feel him battering at her with his mind, searching her out, probing into her, and she resented it with all the passion of her modesty. She gathered up all her forces to resist him.
“You are terrible! Terrible!” she cried. “Don’t you see that it must be good-bye?”
“I say it must not,” he shouted. “I say it is nonsense to talk of good-bye, when we have just met, when the kiss is yet warm on our lips. For a kiss is a holy thing, and I do not kiss unless it is holy. I say it is not good-bye.”
“I say it is and must be,” she said. “You are terrible. You hurt me beyond endurance.”
“And why should you not be hurt? Am I to have all the pain? I want to share even that with you.”
“It is impossible,” she said dully, unable to share, or deal with, or appreciate the violence of his passion, and falling back on the mulishness which had been developed in her through her tussles with her brothers. Through her mind shot the horrible thought:—
“We are quarrelling—already quarrelling.”
To her he seemed to be dragging her down, defiling her. His eyes were glaring at her with a passion that she took for sensuality, because it came out of the dinginess of his soul. And he was stiffening into an iron column of egoism, on which she knew she could make no impression. She knew, too, that her presence was aggravating the stiffening process. . . . She felt caught, trapped, and she wanted to get away. Love must be free—free as the wind on the heath, as the blossom of the wild cherry. Love must have its blossoming time, and he was demanding the full heat of the summer. . . . She must get away.
“Good-bye,” she said, holding out her hand.