“I’m glad I came down,” he remarked. “I know it’ll hold now. You won’t mind my tying it round you, will you? I’ll have both the ends down here presently. It’s round a strong hook. It’s all right. And then I’ll pull you up.”
Philippa looked at him with angry dismay. All this agitating fuss over so childish an adventure irritated her beyond endurance. His proposal had, as a matter of fact, a most subtle and curious effect upon her. It changed the relations between them. It reduced her to the position of a girl playing with an elder brother. It outraged, with an element of the comic, her sense of dramatic fastidiousness. It humiliated her pride and broke the twisted threads of all kinds of delicate spiritual nets she had in her mind to cast over him. It placed her by his side as a weak and timid woman by the side of a willful and strong-limbed man. Her ascendency over him, as she well knew, depended upon the retaining, on her part, of a certain psychic evasiveness—a certain mysterious and tantalizing reserve. It depended—at any rate that is what she imagined—upon the inscrutable look she could throw into her eyes and upon the tragic glamour of her ambiguous red lips and white cheeks. How could she possibly retain all these characteristics when swinging to and fro at the end of a rope?
Sorio’s suggestion outraged something in her that went down to the very root of her personality. Walking with him, swimming with him, rowing in a boat with him—all those things were harmonious to her mind and congruous with her personal charm. None of these things interfered with the play of her intelligence, with the poise, the reserve, the aloofness of her spiritual challenge. She was exceptionally devoid of fear in these boyish sports and could feel herself when she engaged in them with him, free of the limitations of her sex. She could retain completely, as she indulged herself in them, all the equilibrium of her being—the rhythm of her identity. But this proposal of Sorio’s not only introduced a discordant element that had a shrewd vein of the ludicrous in it, it threw her into a physical panic. It pulled and tugged at the inmost fibres of her self-restraint. It made her long to sit down on the ground and cry like a child. She wondered vaguely whether it was that Adrian was revenging himself upon her at that moment for some accumulated series of half-physical outrages that he had himself in his neurotic state been subjected to lately. As to his actual sanity, it never occurred to her to question that. She herself was too wayward and whimsical in the reactions of her nerves and the processes of her mind to find anything startling, in that sense, in what he was now suggesting. It was simply that it changed their relations—it destroyed her ascendency, it brought things down to brute force, it turned her into a woman.
Her mind, as she stood hesitating, reviewed the moth incident. That sort of situation—Adrian’s fantastic mania for rescuing things—had just the opposite effect on her. He might poke his stick into half the ditches of Rodmoor and save innumerable drowning moths; the only effect that had on her was to make her feel superior to him, better adapted than he to face the essential facts of life, its inherent and integral cruelty for instance. But now—to see that horrible rope-end dangling from that gaping hole and to see the eager, violent, masculine look in her friend’s eyes—it was unendurable; it drove her, so to speak, against the jagged edge of the world’s brute wall.
“To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes,
Is delicate and rare—”
she found herself quoting, with a horrible sense that the humour of the parody only sharpened the sting of her dilemma.
“I won’t do it,” she said resolutely at last, trying to brave it out with a smile. “It’s a ridiculous idea. Besides, I’m much too heavy. You couldn’t pull me up if you tried till nightfall! No, no, Adriano, don’t be so absurd. Don’t spoil our time together with these mad ideas. Let’s sit down here and talk. Or why not light a fire? That would be exciting enough, wouldn’t it?”
His face as he listened to her darkened to a kind of savage fury. Its despotic and imperious lines emphasized themselves to a degree that was really terrifying.
“You won’t?” he cried, “you won’t, you won’t?” And seizing her roughly by the shoulder he actually began twisting the rope round her body.