“We have heard often how you were admired in Rome. I wonder—don’t be offended!”—said Nora, bluntly—“have you ever been in love?”
“Never!” The reply was passionately prompt.
Nora looked thoughtful.
“Perhaps you don’t know whether you were or not. Girls get so dreadfully mixed up. But I am sure people—men—have been in love with you.”
“Well, of course!” said Connie, with the same emphatic gaiety.
Nora opened her eyes.
“‘Of course?’ But I know heaps of girls with whom nobody has ever been in love!”
As soon as she was alone, Connie locked her door, and walked restlessly up and down her room, till by sheer movement she had tamed a certain wild spirit within her let loose by Nora’s question. And as she walked, the grey Oxford walls, the Oxford lilacs and laburnums, vanished from perception. She was in another scene. Hot sun—gleaming orange-gardens and blue sea—bare-footed, black-eyed children—and a man beside her, on whom she has been showering epithets that would have shamed—surely!—any other human being in the world. Tears of excitement are in her eyes; in his a laughing triumph mixed with astonishment.
“But, now—” she thinks, drawing herself up, erect and tense, her hands behind her head; “now, I am ready for him. Let him try such ways again—if he dare!”