“You are such a dear, Bobby. You are so warm and kind that it seems ungrateful not to give myself to you with both hands. But I just can’t. I’m not a normal woman perhaps. Or something has happened to me unawares. Perhaps life has cheated me out of something.... Oh, I don’t know, Bobby. I want some one dreadfully; I want you dreadfully and I don’t want you at all. I’d rather be dead than a female thing like Margaret Means. If that’s marrying——!”
“But I thought,” said Bobby, “after all that’s happened——”
“No.”
“I’ll wait ten years for you,” said Bobby, “on the chance of your altering your mind.”
“You are the dearest comforter,” said Christina Alberta, and stopped short....
And suddenly she had put her hands upon his shoulders and clung to him and broken into a wild passion of weeping.
“Wetting you instead of wedding you,” she sobbed and laughed. “Oh, my poor Bobby! you dear lover!”
She clung to him for a time. Then she detached herself and stood wiping her eyes, the Christina Alberta he generally knew, except for the traces of her tears. “If women can’t control their emotions better,” she said, “they’ll have to go back to Harems. We can’t have it both ways. But I won’t marry you. There’s no man in the world I can marry. I’m going to be a free and independent woman, Bobby. From now on.”
“But I don’t understand!” said Bobby.
“It’s not because I don’t want you to love me.”