In spite of her shrinking, of a half articulate appeal, he crushed her against his face. Whatever that had filled her with hope, she thought, was being torn from her. A sickening aversion over which she had no control made her stark in his arms. The memories of the painted coarse satiety of women and the sly hard men for which they schemed, the loose discussions of calculated advances and sordid surrenders, flooded her with a loathing for what she passionately needed to be beautiful.
Yet deep within her, surprising in its vitality, a fragile ardor persisted. If she could explain, not only might he understand, but be able to make her own longing clear and secure. But all she managed to say was, “If you kiss me again I think it will kill me.” Even that failed to stop him. “You were never alive,” he asserted. “I'll put some feeling into you. It has been done before with marble.”
Linda, unresponsive, suffered inordinately.
Again on her feet she saw that Pleydon was angry, his face grim. He seemed changed, threatening and unfamiliar; it was exactly as if, in place of Dodge Pleydon, a secretive impersonal ugliness stood disclosed before her. He said harshly:
“When will you marry me?”
It was what, above all else, she had wanted; and Linda realized that to marry him was still the crown of whatever happiness she could imagine. But her horror of the past recreated by his beating down of her gossamer-like aspiration, the vision of him flushed and ruthless, an image of indiscriminate nameless man, made it impossible for her to reply. An abandon of shrinking fear numbed her heart and lips.
“You won't get rid of me as you do the others about you,” he continued. “This time you made a mistake. I haven't any pride that you can insult; but I have all that you—with your character—require. I have more money even than you can want.” She cried despairingly:
“It isn't that now! I had forgotten everything to do with money and depended on you to take me away from it always.”
“When will you marry me?”
In a flash of blinding perception, leaving her as dazed as though it had been a physical actuality, she realized that marrying him had become an impossibility. At the barest thought of it the dread again closed about her like ice. She tried, with all the force of old valuations, with even an effort to summon back the vanquished thrill, to give herself to him. But a quality overpowering and instinctive, the response of her incalculable injury, made any contact with him hateful. It was utterly beyond her power to explain. A greater mystery still partly unfolded—whatever she had hoped from Pleydon belonged to the special emotion that had possessed her since earliest childhood.