She flashed a quick untranslatable look at him and smiled.
“My lovers? They weren’t lovers at all, they were explorers, experimental philosophers. They had the same strong yearning for me that a botanist has for a blue chrysanthemum or a yellow aster. If a man could succeed in getting this thing he would go mad over it and put it in the best house in his grounds for all his neighbours and friends to admire, but do you think he would love it like an ordinary sweet red rose that he can gather, and smell, and caress, and bury his nose in, and wear near his heart? Not he!
“Do you think one of these men ever wanted to touch me,” she went on calmly, taking little sips of wine, “or to ruffle the hair round my forehead which is their invariable habit in novels, or to lay his hand on my bare shoulder—they do that, too, I have read—or to clasp me to his breast, the climax to these pretty little customs of theirs? Goodness! And imagine my feelings if one had! But they didn’t even want to; and yet they were my slaves, to do with precisely as I liked.
“When I was in the thick of it I thought I could not live without all this, yet it was disappointing on the whole, I believe. I remember wishing now and then that I could flirt like other girls, and make men make palpable fools of themselves for my sake. It looks such a very delightful pastime! I have seen plain girls look positively quite beautiful when engaged in it. The under-current of heaps of girls lives, upon which it seems to me all the rest is built up, is a sort of simmering, unconfessed, vague longing for the sensation of being ‘caught and kissed’, like the little brown maid in the old rhyme; not in a general vulgar way, but in a well-bred particular way. It is a quite incomprehensible sensation to me.”
“Probably. It’s natural all the same,” he said looking at her eyes which regarded him curiously, “and Nature is such a vindictive grasping beast it is as well not to run counter to her, or she will have limb for limb.”
“I wonder what limb of mine she will want?”
“Oh you, she’ll trip you up in your own coils somehow! Fill you with an overpowering desire to be ‘caught and kissed’,” he said with a short laugh, “and have no one handy to do it.”
“Oh, then she must make me over again!”
She stood up and looked down over the gloomy valley.
“What is it to be natural, I wonder? I don’t know.”