For a few hundred yards neither of them spoke. Then Louise began anew.
"And that is not all. You judge harshly and unfairly because you don't know the facts. I am almost quite alone in the world. I have no relatives that I care for, except one brother. I lived with him, on his station in Queensland, until I came here. But now he's married, and there would be no room for me in the house—figuratively speaking. If I go back now, I must share his home with his wife, whom I knew and disliked. While here is some one who is fond of me, and is rich, and who offers me not only a home of my own, but, what is far more to me, an entirely new life in a new world."
"Excellent reasons! But in reckoning them up, you have forgotten what seems to me the most important one of all; whether or no you care for him, for this ..." this in his trouble, he could not find a suitable epithet.
But Louise refused to be touched. "I like him," she answered, and looked across the slope of meadow they were passing. "I liked him, yes, as any woman would like a man who treated her as he did me. He was very good tome. And not in the least repugnant.—But care?" she interrupted herself. "If by care, you mean ... Then no, a hundred thousand times, no! I shall never care for anyone in that way again, and you know it. I had enough of that to last me all my life."
"Very well, then, and I say, if you married a man you care for as little as that, I should never believe in a woman again.—Not, of course, that it matters to you what I believe in and what I don't? But to hear you—you, Louise!—counting up the profits to be gained from it, like ... like—oh, I don't know what! I couldn't have believed it of you."
"You are a very uncomfortable person, Maurice."
"I mean to be. And more than uncomfortable. Listen to me! You talk of it lightly and coolly; but if you married this man, without caring for him more than you say you do, just for the sake of a home, or his money, or his good manners, or the primitive animal, or whatever it is that attracts you in him:"—he grew bitter again in spite of himself—"if you did this, you would be stifling all that is good and generous in your nature. For you may say what you like; the man is little more than a stranger to you. What can you know of his real character? And what can he know of you?"
"He knows as much of me as I ever intend him to know."
"Indeed! Then you wouldn't tell him, for instance, that only a few months ago, you were eating your heart out for some one else?"
Louise winced as though the words had struck her in the face. Before she answered, she stood still, in the middle of the path, and pinned on, with deliberate movements, the big white hat, beneath the drooping brim and nodding feathers of which, her eyes were as black as coals.