‘Soberly and seriously?’ inquired her cousin. ‘I mean, is it a thing you honestly want? I thought you cared about nobody’s opinion.’
‘I didn’t,’ she answered, ‘and I don’t. And yet just this I do care for. I want you to be friends with me. In my heart I am friends with you already—greater friends than I could ever have believed. Why should I be, why should I want to be? I have no idea. Well, what do you say?’
‘Yes, if you will,’ replied Kingston. ‘Why shouldn’t we be friends? We count as cousins.’
‘You don’t like me yet, of course,’ said Isabel calmly. ‘But, then, nobody does at first. All I want is that you shouldn’t be hostile and stick out bristles and resist. The rest will come.’
Kingston’s consciousness was in a whirl. He knew that he thoroughly disliked this saucer-eyed, eager creature. Everything she said and did aroused in him pulses of animosity so keen as to be almost physical. On the other hand, in some strange way, she allured, fascinated, excited him. She led his instincts captive, while his judgment went charging down upon her undaunted. Irritating though she might be, she was neither stodgy nor boring. His mind seemed to pringle under her influence, fiercely yet thrillingly, like a numb, constricted limb awakening from its sleep. Compared to Gundred, she was as brandy to milk. Of course Kingston loved the milk and loathed the brandy. But loathsome though it might be, he could not deny that the brandy was more potent, more stirring, more exciting than the milk. Since the brandy was forcing itself into his cup, there was no need to throw it roughly away; he might sip, under protest, now and then, without danger of contracting any disloyal craving for brandy instead of milk.
‘Very well,’ he said; ‘let us be friends, Isabel. One can’t control one’s love or liking. But everything comes to those who wait. So we will be friends.’
His candour pleased her.
‘Control?’ she said. ‘Our feelings control us, if they are real feelings. The only real feelings are those that are uncontrollable.’
‘I am the son of many generations of unreal feelings then. There are no love stories in my quiet family—at least, only one, and that was a mad freak.’
‘There are no others in mine,’ said Isabel, ‘except hate stories, perhaps. And I suppose they are the same thing, only turned wrong way out.’