“Why?” said the other, ingenuously.
“You have no heart, you have no feeling!”
“You are jesting?”
“Che! I am in earnest. Do not say these cruel, blood-thirsty things to me. You can only realise hate, torture, revenge. You know nothing of love.”
“But I neither hate nor love the hare. I kill it for the pleasure of the thing.”
“Pleasure! a great word; that which you sacrifice everything to; it is brutality.”
“I cannot argue with you,” he said, humbly. “You always conquer me by saying things that pain me.”
“I wish you were good and tender-hearted,” murmured Lucia, vaguely. “You men have bursts of violent but short-lived passion; but women have constant, enduring tenderness.”
“That is why love is so beautiful,” he cried, triumphantly.
To save her from being scratched by a straggling briar, Andrea drew her towards him, murmuring close to her ear: “Love ... love.”