“Stuff!” said Magdalen—and shrieked with laughter! He blushed furiously.
“Look here,” he snarled, “do you or don’t you love me?”
“I do,” snapped Magdalen. “But I’ve got ideas.”
Ivor leant forward truculently.
“Then if you do,” he said very slowly, “what the devil are you talking about?”
Magdalen leant forward, so that there was nothing but their breath between her earnest face and his truculent face.
“I adore you—mark that, Ivor! Maybe I don’t love you as a dairymaid would love you, but I’m sure that into one month I cram as much love for you as a dairymaid would give in a lifetime; her way is called ‘simplicity,’ and is supposed to be divine. But I am divine in my own way. I adore you. If I were an epithet and you were a noun I’d follow you about on every page of the book of life—until you were oh so tired of me! But I get ideas....”
“Women have moods,” she whispered. “And let me tell you about these moods, Ivor, so that you will learn not to madden the women who will love you. Women have moods every now and then, they can’t help it and no one can help them. You knew that? You poor lamb, you don’t know anything really.... These moods, let me tell you, are vast and inexplicable and untidy and terrible. They devastate everything. Particularly, they devastate men, these moods. I’ve seen them destroy better men than you, Ivor. They change a woman’s personality, they give her a new mind for that short time, a new and unhappy mind, as every one is unhappy who sees too clearly—but lovers go on being lovers, not understanding anything but that it’s a damned nuisance, not understanding that this woman’s mood can change a lover into a man and a man into dross. Women are much given to wanting to speak the truth in this mood, for hysteria seems to act that way—but they generally don’t speak it, life being what it is, and that’s what makes them so evil and bad-tempered to the men they love, but who insist on loving them at any hour of the day and night, regardless of sense or sensibility....”
“Of course,” said Ivor reasonably, “if it’s only a mood....”
Now a mood is like a cloud against the sky, it comes and goes and leaves no mark. But that is a lie, for a mood is like nothing else at all.