“I knew it. That’s why I felt that you were gentle and loving. I would have liked to put my arms around you and cry. I wanted to be babied. It is strange, isn’t it, how physical suffering can unman a fellow?”
Charlotte turned her eyes on him for an instant. He could just see their gleam by the reflection of a ray streaming out on the water from a light on the lower deck, and they were infinitely tender yet mirthful. “You understand yourself thoroughly,” she said. “You were a brave baby and a good baby but you were a baby, Martin, a great six-foot baby.”
“Well, if it made you fall in love with me—
“Ah! but I didn’t then. You bullied me into being in love with you. You wouldn’t give me a chance to make myself heard.”
“What about that time I kissed you?” said Martin, referring to that episode for the first time since his very formal and abject letter of apology had met an equally formal but cold forgiveness from her.
To his consternation, she drew away from him in sudden displeasure. “Perhaps we had better not speak of it.”
“Why shouldn’t we speak of it? Is it a crime for a man to kiss a woman he loves? Did it contaminate you?”
“I had given you no right, no encouragement.”
“I’d have done it if I had known I was to be kicked out of the hospital, broken ribs and all. Besides, how is a man to know whether he has any rights till he exercises them?”
Martin put the question seriously in all good faith. It was his primitive philosophy again, the simple way in which he tested women in his sphere of life. She was at a loss how to reply, and somewhat sore put to hide her inexperience in affairs of the sort. She had been brought up to believe that milkmaids kiss their young men over the gate, but that, in refined society, men offer no caresses to girls whom they respect, unless a troth has first been plighted. Had she chummed more with girls and young women, she might have learned that even in the best of society, young people pay little heed to the strong statements of their elders, and that, wise heads to the contrary, young blood will have its toll. But Charlotte had had no chums and had never exchanged gossip over late bedroom fires. Her views on the propriety of kissing were entirely theoretical. But that kiss was a sore remembrance with her. It marked the beginning of the end. It was an opening door which gave her an instant’s glance into the kingdom of love; and from its bestowal, she had known that she was confronted with a mighty temptation to open it further and to go boldly into the fair land. How hard she had fought with the inclination, she could never tell Martin Collingwood; but she had fought, and she had lost.