“Our lodge satisfies me,” she said.
So then I should have to dazzle her with one stroke, in spite of my desire to drink in her emotion slowly and in little swallows. She would not guess. Not to lose anything of the agitation she was about to feel I looked her full in the face, as I went on:
“You will leave your lodge some day.”
She was astonished and even showed some anxiety.
“Our lodge? When?”
“When you marry.”—
Then, in order to strike her the more suddenly, I added with scarcely a pause: “When you become my wife.”
I watched for the rapture which these magic words were surely to produce. Instead she only burst into a laugh, though it seemed to me that the laugh did not have its accustomed clearness.
“It is absurd,” she said, “to make fun that way.”
I insisted that I was in earnest, and repeated my declaration, which was more like an announcement than a proposal of marriage, so certain was I in advance of her consent. Could the idea of a refusal have entered my mind? I could sooner have believed that Raymonde was mad.