“That’s the way!” he flung out, “that’s the way I knew you’d take it. You girls want to be loved but you must be loved just thus and so. A touch too near, a word too far—and you’re all up in arms.”
Nance felt as though an ice-cold wedge had been thrust between her breasts.
“Adrian,” she cried, “how can you treat me in this way? How can you say these things to me? Have I ever stopped you kissing me? Have I ever been unresponsive to you?”
He looked away from her and began pulling up a patch of moss by its roots. “What are you annoyed about, then?” he muttered.
She sighed bitterly. Then with a strong effort to give her voice a natural tone. “I didn’t feel as though you were kissing me at all just now. I was simply a girl in your arms—any girl! It was a shame, Adrian. It hurt me. Surely, dear,”—her voice grew gentle and pleading—“you must know what I mean.”
“I don’t know in the least what you mean,” he cried. “It’s some silly, absurd scruple some one’s been putting in your head. I can’t always make love to you as if we were two children, can I—two babes in the wood?”
Nance’s mouth quivered at this and she stretched out her arm towards him and then, letting it drop, fumbled with her fingers at a blade of grass. A curious line, rarely visible on her face, wrinkled her forehead and twitched a little as if it had been a nerve beneath the skin. This line had a pathos in it beyond a mere frown. It would have been well if the Italian had recalled, as he saw it, certain ancient tragic masks of his native country, but it is one of life’s persistent ironies that the tokens of monumental sorrow, which serve so nobly the purposes of art, should only excite peevish irritation when seen near at hand. Sorio did not miss that line of suffering but instead of softening him it increased his bitterness.
“You’re really not angry about my kissing you,” he said. “That’s what all you women do—you pitch upon something quite different and revenge yourself with it, when all the time you’re thinking about—God knows what!—some mad grievance of your own that has no connection with what you say!”
She leapt up at this, as if bitten by an adder and looked at him with flashing eyes.
“Adrian! You’ve no right—I’ve never given you the right—to speak to me so. Come! We’d better go back to the house. I wish—oh, how I wish—I’d never asked you to meet me here.”