“Unless you can be more entertaining, we might as well be sitting in the Purdies’ dressing-rooms, as standing here. Suppose we go to the library and sit with mamma and papa?” Clearly the pose felt nervous.
Peter did not like this idea. So he said: “I’ll try to amuse you. Let me tell you something very interesting to me. It’s my birthday to-morrow.”
“Oh!” said Leonore. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Then I would have had a gift for you.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
“Don’t you want me to give you something?”
“Yes.” Then Peter’s hands trembled, and he seemed to have hard work in adding, “I want you to give me—a kiss.”
“Peter!” said Leonore, drawing back grieved and indignant. “I didn’t think you would speak to me so. Of all men!”
“You mustn’t think,” said Peter, “that I meant to pain you.”
“You have,” said Leonore, almost ready to cry.
“Because,” said Peter, “that isn’t what I meant.” Peter obviously struggled to find words to say what he did mean as he had never struggled over the knottiest of legal points, or the hardest of wrestling matches. “If I thought you were a girl who would kiss a man for the asking, I should not care for a kiss from you.” Peter strayed away from the fire uneasily. “But I know you are not.” Peter gazed wildly round, as if the furnishings, of the hall might suggest the words for which he was blindly groping. But they didn’t, and after one or two half-begun sentences, he continued: “I haven’t watched you, and dreamed about you, and loved you, for all this time, without learning what you are.” Peter roamed about the great hall restlessly. “I know that your lips will never give what your heart doesn’t.” Then his face took a despairing look, and he continued quite rapidly: “I ask without much hope. You are so lovely, while I—well I’m not a man women care for. I’ve tried to please you. Tried to please you so hard, that I may have deceived you. I probably am what women say of me. But if I’ve been otherwise with you it is because you are different from any other woman in the world.” Here the sudden flow of words ended, and Peter paced up and down, trying to find what to say. If any one had seen Peter as he paced, without his present environment, he would have thought him a man meditating suicide. Suddenly his voice and face became less wild, and he said tenderly: “There is no use in my telling you how I love you. You know it now, or will never learn it from anything I can say.” Peter strode back to the fire. “It is my love which asks for a kiss. And I want it for the love you will give with it, if you can give it.”