"Ah, ah! It is never wise to threaten, Folle-Farine. I do not threaten. You are foolish; you are unreasonable: and that is the privilege of a woman. I am not angered at it. On the contrary, it adds to your charm. You are a beautiful, reckless, stubborn, half-mad, half-savage creature. Passion and liberty become you,—become you like your ignorance and your ferocity. I would not for worlds that you should change them."
"Let me go!" she cried, across his words.
"Oh, fool! the winter will be hard,—and you are bare of foot,—and you have not a crust!"
"Let me go."
"Ah! Go?—to beg your way to Paris, and to creep through the cellars and the hospitals till you can see your lover's face, and to crouch a moment at his feet to hear him mutter a curse on you in payment for your pilgrimage; and then to slit your throat or his—in your despair, and lie dead in all your loveliness in the common ditch."
"Let me go, I say!"
"Or else, more like, come back to me in a week's time and say, 'I was mad but now I am wise. Give me the golden pear. What matter a little speck? What is golden may be rotten; but to all lips it is sweet.'"
"Let me go!"
She stood at bay before him, pale in her scorn of rags, her right hand clinched against her breast, her eyes breathing fire, her whole attitude instinct with the tempest of contempt and loathing, which she held down thus, passive and almost wordless, because she once had promised never to be thankless to this man.
He gazed at her and smiled, and thought how beautiful that chained whirlwind of her passions looked; but he did not touch her nor even go nearer to her. There was a dangerous gleam in her eyes that daunted him. Moreover, he was patient, humorous, gentle, cruel, wise,—all in one; and he desired to tame and to beguile her, and to see her slowly drawn into the subtle sweetness of the powers of gold; and to enjoy the yielding of each moral weakness one by one, as the southern boy slowly pulls limb from limb, wing from wing, of the cicala.