Ninsy looked exquisitely fragile and slender, lying back in this tender helplessness, her chestnut-coloured hair all loose over her pillow. Philip was filled with a flood of romantic emotion. The girl had always attracted him but never so much as now. It was one of his ingrained peculiarities to find hurt and unhappy people more engaging than healthy and contented ones. He almost wished Ninsy would stop smiling and chattering so pleasantly. It only needed that she should shed tears, to turn the young man’s commiseration into passion.
But Ninsy did not shed tears. She continued chatting to him in the most cheerful vein. It was only by the faintest shadow that crossed her face at intervals, that one could have known that anything serious was the matter with her. She spoke of the books he had lent her. She spoke of the probable break-up of the weather. She talked of Lacrima Traffio.
“I think,” she said, speaking with extreme earnestness, “the young foreign lady is lovely to look at. I hope she’ll be happy in this marriage. They do say, poor dear, she is being driven to it. But with the gentry you never know. They aren’t like us. Father says they have all their marriages thought out for them, same as royalty. I wonder who Miss Gladys will marry after all! Father has met her several times lately, walking with that American gentleman.”
“Has Jim Andersen been up to see you, Ninsy,” put in Mr. Wone’s emissary, “since this last attack of yours?”
The fact that this question left his lips simultaneously with a rising current of emotion in his heart towards her is a proof of the fantastic complication of feeling in the young anarchist.
He fretted and chafed under the stream of her gentle impersonal talk. He longed to rouse in her some definite agitation, even though it meant the introduction of his rival’s image. The fact that such agitation was likely to be a shock to her did not weigh with him. Objective consideration for people’s bodily health was not one of Philip’s weaknesses. His experiment met with complete success. At the mention of James Andersen’s name a scarlet flush came into the girl’s cheeks.
“No—yes—no!” she answered stammering. “That is—I mean—not since I have been ill. But before—several times—lately. Why do you look at me like that, Philip? You’re not angry with me, are you?”
Philip’s mind was a confused arena of contradictory emotions. Among the rest, two stood out and asserted themselves—this unpardonable and remorseless desire to trouble her, to embarrass her, to make her blush yet more deeply—and a strange wild longing to be himself as ill as she was, and of the same disease, so that they might die together!
“My father wanted me to ask you,” he blurted out, “whether you would use your influence over Jim to get him to help in this election business. I told my father Jim would do anything you asked him.”
The girl’s poor cheeks burned more deeply than ever at this.