“Oh, if I only could treat him as I did the others!” she muttered under her breath, “but I can’t, I can’t!”
She was frightened at herself—at the power which drove her to the man inexorably,—she looked at the door and stirred in her seat, half-rising, but she sat down again and began to move her ring with the old movement, only quicker and with tenser fingers.
Then a cold feeling of finality came on her, she knew she must say something and she knew she was going to say the wrong thing; an inexplicable smile flickered across her face and touched her mouth, she grew quite calm and ceased to move her ring.
“You have done me a very high honour,” she said; “thank you.”
He came nearer and looked down on her.
“I have tried to be perfectly honest,” he said, “and you have no idea what an awful grind it has been. It would be quite impossible for me to give you any idea of how I honour you, and as for love—” he stopped, breathing hard, “I have a heart full for you, dear, I don’t think I know myself how much I love you.”
The girl looked at him curiously, the simple intensity of his manner struck her, then her eyes fell and she sighed.
“Love is such a mere name to me,” she said, “it seems such a collapsable bubbly thing and put to such feeble uses. You want me to be your wife then, and you offer me a whole heart full of love, whatever that may mean. I must be honest too, and tell you that I shouldn’t know how to dispose of a whole heart full of love. I know nothing at all practically about the matter, and theoretically it has never interested me. My situation is hard to explain,” she exclaimed, with a petulant sweeping movement of her hand, “in the face of all this I want to accept your offer, I don’t know why, I really believe it is not I, Gwen Waring, that wants this, it is something outside me that wants it for me. I never felt so impersonal in all my life.”
He winced, her honesty, to say the least of it, was a trifle bald.
“Perhaps I am more concerned in it than I think,” she went on with a queer intense serenity, dissecting herself audibly, “I like new sensations, I am curious, most things are so flat and boring.”