“Pray, what is that?” The eyes held now a lurking, troubled smile; for him at that moment, their fascination verged upon the tragic.
Suddenly both the slender wrists were seized by this forcible thinker. “Why the time spirit, you charmer. And that just asks one simple question. Do you love me—or do you not?”
IV
She tried to keep her eyes from his.
“You can’t hide the truth,” he cried triumphantly. “And if you think I’m going to lose you for the sake of some stupid piece of prejudice you don’t know what it means to live five years in God’s own country.”
She seemed to shrink into herself. “Don’t you see the impossibility of the whole thing?” she gasped.
“Frankly, I don’t, or I wouldn’t be such a cad as to badger you. If you marry me an effete strain is going to be your debtor. Just look at them—poor devils! Look at the two who died untimely. That’s the feudal system of marriage working to a logical conclusion. And if I put it squarely to my kinsman, Albert John, who is by no means a fool, he’d be the first to admit it. No, it doesn’t matter what your arguments are, if you override the call of the blood sooner or later there’s bound to be big trouble.”
The conviction of the tone, the urgency of the manner were indeed hard to meet. From the only point of view that really mattered it was impossible to gainsay him, and she was far too intelligent to try. Suddenly she broke away from him and in a wretched state of indecision and unhappiness flung herself into a chair.
“The whole thing’s as clear as daylight.” Pitilessly he followed up the advantage he had won. “There’s really no need to state it. And once more, to come down to bedrock, far better to make an end of Bridport House and all that it stands for—just what it does stand for I have not been able to make out—than that it should perpetuate a race of inbred incompetents who are merely a fixed charge on the community.”
“Oh, you don’t see—you don’t see!” The words were rather feeble, and rather wild, but just then they were all she could offer. Yet in spite of herself, and in spite of the half-promise the intensely unhappy Aunt Harriet had wrung from her on the previous afternoon, the clear-cut determination of this young man, his force and his breadth, his absolute conviction were beginning to tell heavily.