She threw his arm from her in a gust of physical impatience, but the glance with which, on the instant, she corrected this demonstration, was full of honest compassion. He groveled before this benign gaze, with bowed head and outstretched, pleading hands.
“Forgive me! Forgive me!” he groaned, brokenly. “I could not—at all—know what it was I said. I am too unhappy!”
“Well,” she began, with a vehement effort at calmness, “let us say good-bye here. There are some Germans watching us from the hotel windows. Or it is better perhaps—will you walk on past the school?” As they moved forward, she recovered more of her self-possession. “I hope you will be able to remember something pleasant out of our morning,” she said, and with a joyless laugh added, “but for the life of me, I don’t know what it can be. Or yes, you can remember when you woke up, and I stood and scolded you, from above the flowers. I pretended to bully you, but really all the while I was thinking how sweet of you the entire thing was. And later, too—oh, there were several intervals in which I behaved civilly to you for whole minutes at a time.”
He looked wistfully at her. Beneath the forced playfulness of her tone it seemed to him that something hopeful sounded. “Ah, dear friend,” he murmured, drawing close to her—“think!—think tenderly in my behalf! Ask yourself—your kindest self—if I must be really driven away. Why is it that I may not stay? I plead with you as if it were for my life—and is it not indeed for my life?—my very life?”
“No—Christian,” she said, gravely, “it is not your life, nor anything like your life. You give big labels to your emotions, but in good time you will see that the things themselves are not so big, or so vital. And you mustn’t yield so readily to all these impulses to mope and despair and to think yourself ill used. You must try to make for yourself a thicker skin—and to view things more calmly. And I don’t want you to go away thinking hard things of me. Is it true that I always nag you—there is something in you which calls out all the bully in me—but I wish you would think of me as your friend. It gives me great pleasure when you speak of me as your oldest friend in England—for I have always liked you, and I am interested in you, and—”
“And why will you not marry me?” He interposed the question bluntly, and with a directness which gave it the effect of an obstacle in her path, isolated but impassable.
She halted, and studied the pavement in consideration of her reply. When she looked up, it was with the veiled elation of a disputant who has his counter-stroke well in hand. “You said to-day that you had become your own master, and that you were a free man, with your life in your own hands. Very well. I also am my own master, and I am a free woman. My life is exclusively my own personal property, to live as I choose to live it. I value my liberty quite as highly as if I were a man. It does not suit me to merge any part of it in something else. There could be many other reasons given, no doubt, but they would be merely individual variations of this one chief reason—that I am a free woman, and intend to remain a free woman. I know what I want to do in the world, and I am going to try to do it, always my own way, always my own master.”
He regarded her thoughtfully, bowing his head in token of comprehension. “But if——” he began, and then checked himself, with a gesture of pained submission.
“There are no ‘ifs,’” she said, with resolute calmness, and held out her hand to him. Her control of the situation was undisputed. “We say good-bye, now—and we are friends—good friends. I—I thank you—for everything!”
He stood looking at her as she walked away—a sedately graceful figure, erect and light of step, receding from him under the pallid green shelter of the young trees. Musingly, he held up the hand which still preserved the sense of that farewell contact with hers—and upon a sudden impulse put it to his lips and kissed it. Something in the action wrought an instantaneous change in his thoughts. All at once it was apparent to him that many things which should have been said to her he had left unsaid. In truth, it seemed upon reflection that he had said and done everything wrong. The notion of running after her flamed up in him for a moment. She was still in sight—he could distinguish her in the distance, stopping to buy a paper from a boy near the Temple station. But then the memory of her unanswerable, irrevocable “No” swept back upon him—and with a long sigh he turned and strode in the other direction.