The tone implied a query, but I made no answer. There were heart thrills in the air, and my brush, pregnant with their subtle rhythm, was travailling fast.
"Why don't you say it was?" she persisted. "You know that love—real love—is worse than handcuffs."
"'A cloying treacle to the wings of independence'—eh? Keats would have been glad of the treacle nevertheless."
"Perhaps. Wouldn't we just drown in it if we could?... But, after all, I should have been a fat lump of domesticity by now," she laughed, straightening her lithe limbs and resuming her conventional smile.
In a moment she had become the world's Betty again—bewitching, coy, insouciante Betty.
But a tear-drop still clung to her eyelashes.