“Aye!” boomed Daniel. “The ayes have it and it is so ordered.”
“Steam roller tactics,” Maisie protested and laughed to conceal her chagrin. She had obeyed the instinct of her sex, which is to flee from the male, even while obsessed with the desire to be overtaken. She had yielded to the feminine impulse to chastise him for his clumsiness in love-making, to play with him awhile, as a cat plays with a mouse, before claiming the poor victim. She wanted him to be rough and resolute, to thrust aside her protestations and claim her by brute force and the right of discovery. She was very happy and she had desired to linger a brief moment in the afterglow of her decision to surrender to him—before surrendering. She wanted to be deferred to, to have him plead with her for her love, to deluge her with a swift avalanche of love words. How could she confess her yearning for him until he had laid at her feet the wondrous burden of his own great love and asked her, humbly, to accept the gift in exchange for her own?
Maisie had never really had a sweetheart before. She was a girl of the type that has a cool habit of keeping amorous youths at arm’s length. Unlike so many of her girl friends, she could not bear to be pawed over by youths who failed to arouse in her the slightest interest. She had never sought conquest for the sake of conquest, although all of her life she had hugged to her heart an ideal of love. She would marry the one great love of her life, and having married, she would devote her life to making her husband happy and comfortable. She would bear children for him; she would keep herself young and fresh; she would not do any of the stupid things she frequently observed young matrons in her set doing to their husbands—driving them crazy by daily, almost hourly, demands for renewed, fervid assurances of undying love; tagging after them always, herding them in, cutting them off from healthy association with other harassed males, protesting against everything not connected with the office and the home.
For Maisie was, without anybody close to her remotely suspecting it, a tremendously romantic young woman. She yearned with a great yearning to be wooed by a romantic lover who was fifty per cent slave and fifty per cent Prince Charming. Long before she had ever fallen in love with Dan Pritchard she had fallen in love with love; hence her automatic resentment of Dan Pritchard’s peculiar approach to the Great Adventure. Having shyly hidden within herself all her life, how could she expose her heart to Dan merely to satisfy his accursed curiosity? What assurance had she that he would, in turn, expose his heart to her? Moreover, wasn’t it his first move, the monumental omadhaun! Maisie smiled sweetly, but what she really wanted to do to Dan Pritchard was to slap him furiously and then cry herself to silence and forgiveness in his arms.
“Well, pride comes before a fall,” Dan answered her lugubriously.
“You weren’t so very proud,” Maisie assured him, with a forgiving glance.
“Perhaps. But that didn’t soften my fall.”
“I think perhaps you were quite within your rights in asking,” she pursued eagerly. “You’ve known me so long and we’ve always been such good pals, I suppose you concluded——”
“Yes, yes,” he interrupted. “I’m so glad you understand. Well, I’ll not embarrass you again, my dear. You’re much too sweet and lovely to have my silly action of a few minutes ago cast a shadow over our perfect friendship.”
“I’ll have to propose to him after all,” Maisie thought. And she would have done it if a car hadn’t come up behind them and with a hoarse toot warned them of a desire to pass. Maisie could not bring herself to speak at that moment. One does not desire to hint of one’s love to the accompaniment of a motor siren. And to complicate matters Graves glanced back quickly, measured at a glance the speed limit of the following car, and proceeded to run away from it. This infuriated the driver of the other car, who in turn speeded up and continued to honk at them until Graves turned in at the entrance to the hotel grounds and, before Maisie could renew the conversation, had paused before the portals of the hotel and was standing beside the car holding the door open.