"Explain yourself, please."
He came so close to her that she could see every pore in the skin of his face. "I should hardly have thought an explanation necessary. I said, 'Perhaps I have the right to be insolent.' It is for you to explain why"--his lips worked--"you regard 'what I am pleased to call my love for you' as a degradation."
"And if I refuse to explain?"
"There is only one conclusion to be drawn."
"And that is?" she dared him.
Abruptly, Brunton the lawyer became Brunton the husband. He no longer wanted to cross-examine; he wanted to possess--to possess this woman. Why should he not possess her? She was as much his as the furniture in his home, the books in his chambers. By law and by religion, she owed him her body. He had always been chivalrous to her; he had always tried to fall in with her whimsies, to be kind. She had never been kind. All she had tried to do was to hurt him.
"And that conclusion is?" she flung at him.
God! How much she could hurt him. God! How he wished to spare himself. He wanted her so; his whole body ached for her little hands, for her lips, for the touch of her hair. Why should she thus goad him? Even if--even if she had cared--virtuous women did care sometimes, platonically of course--for somebody else, he could forgive her.
He did not want, even, to forgive. He only wanted to know nothing. He only wanted her to be kind to him, to let him love her--in his own way. Without all this--all this fuss.
But her eyes refused him kindness; her lips demanded their answer. She maddened him with her rigid lips, with her blank unfriendly scrutiny.