Theron laid aside his hat. Women were curious creatures, he reflected. Some were susceptible to one line of treatment, some to another. His own reading of Celia had always been that she liked opposition, of a smart, rattling, almost cheeky, sort. One got on best with her by saying bright things. He searched his brain now for some clever quip that would strike sparks from the adamantine mood which for the moment it was her whim to assume. To cover the process, he smiled a little. Then her beauty, as she stood before him, her queenly form clad in a more stiffly fashionable dress than he had seen her wearing before, appealed afresh and overwhelmingly to him. He rose to his feet.
“Have you forgotten our talk in the woods?” he murmured with a wooing note. “Have you forgotten the kiss?”
She shook her head calmly. “I have forgotten nothing.”
“Then why play with me so cruelly now?” he went on, in a voice of tender deprecation. “I know you don't mean it, but all the same it bruises my heart a little. I build myself so wholly upon you, I have made existence itself depend so completely upon your smile, upon a soft glance in your eyes, that when they are not there, why, I suffer, I don't know how to live at all. So be kinder to me, Celia!”
“I was kinder, as you call it, when you came in,” she replied. “I told you to go away. That was pure kindness—more kindness than you deserved.”
Theron looked at his hat, where it stood on the carpet by his feet. He felt tears coming into his eyes. “You tell me that you remember,” he said, in depressed tones, “and yet you treat me like this! Perhaps I am wrong. No doubt it is my own fault. I suppose I ought not to have come down here at all.”
Celia nodded her head in assent to this view.
“But I swear that I was helpless in the matter,” he burst forth. “I HAD to come! It would have been literally impossible for me to have stayed at home, knowing that you were here, and knowing also that—that—”
“Go on!” said Celia, thrusting forth her under-lip a trifle, and hardening still further the gleam in her eye, as he stumbled over his sentence and left it unfinished. “What was the other thing that you were 'knowing'?”
“Knowing—” he took up the word hesitatingly—“knowing that life would be insupportable to me if I could not be near you.”