She had played with Burke, even encouraged him to a certain extent, allowing him to be in her company far more frequently than was altogether wise, considering the circumstance of his hot-headed love for her.
It was with somewhat of a mental start of surprise that she found herself seeking for excuses for his behaviour—actually trying to supply adequate reasons why she should overlook it!
His brooding, sulky silence as he drove along, mile after mile, was not without its appeal to the inherent femininity of her. He did not try to excuse or palliate his conduct, made no attempt to sue for forgiveness. He loved her and he had let her see it; manlike, he had taken what the opportunity offered. And she didn’t suppose he regretted it.
The faintest smile twitched the comers of her lips. Burke was not the type of man to regret an unlawful kiss or two!
She was conscious that—as usual, where he was concerned—her virtuous indignation was oozing away in the most discreditable and hopeless fashion. There was an audacious charm about the man, an attractiveness that would not be denied in the hot-headed way he went, all out, for what he wanted.
Other women, besides Jean had found it equally difficult to resist. His sheer virility, with its splendid disregard for other people’s claims and its conscienceless belief that the battle should assuredly be to the strong, earned him forgiveness where, for misdeeds not half so flagrant, a less imperious sinner would have been promptly shown the door.
But no woman—not even the women to whom he had made love without the excuse of loving—had ever shown Burke the door or given him the kind of treatment which he had thoroughly well merited twenty times over. And Jean was no exception to the rule.
At least he had some genuine claim on her forgiveness—the claim of a love which had swept through his very bung like a flame, the fierce passion of a man to whom love means adoration, worship—above all, possession.
And what woman can ever long remain righteously angry with a man who loves her—and whose very offence is the outcome of the overmastering quality of that love? Very few, and certainly none who was so very much a woman, so essentially feminine as Jean.
It was in a very small voice, which she endeavoured to make airily detached, that she at last broke the silence which had reigned for the last six miles or so.