She smiled at him over her shoulder and made a pretty moue.
Muttering an oath of passion he leaped up, hurried across the room, and began to kiss her fiercely.
He crushed back with his lips all her protests; standing over her, he held her upon the piano-bench until by main strength and with all the force of her resentment she tore away from him.
“And now you are going to blame me because I can't help it,” he gasped.
“I don't in the least understand why normal persons can find any pleasure in that kind of folly.”
“Is your idea of loving anybody rubbing noses like Eskimos?”
“I'd endure that kind of loving in preference to that kind of kissing, Richard. That isn't love which you're offering—not the kind of love I want. I am going out for my walk—you filched it from me. No, I'm going alone. Go and talk with mamma, if you like.”
She escaped the clutch he made and hurried out and to the elevator.
Flushed and angry, Dodd made his way to an inner room where Mrs. Kilgour was reading a novel, sunning herself with feline indolence. She put the book by with evident regret.
“Oh, Kate, has so much poise!” she lamented, breaking in on the young man's complaints. “She is so like her father. No one except myself could do anything with him at all. Sometime it was very hard for me! He would set his mind and his teeth! But I always won in the end.”