“Nor I,” she answered, with a directness that had been foreign to her of late, but that was part and parcel of her real, beautiful nature. “I cannot understand. I only know there is a change in me, or in you to me, and that I cannot help it, or that I have not been able to help it. Sometimes I feel—do not be angry, I will try to tell you—a physical fear of you, of your touch, of your clasp, a fear such as an animal might feel towards the master who had beaten it. I tremble then at your approach. When you are near me I feel cold, oh! so cold and—and anxious; perhaps I ought to say apprehensive. Oh, I am hurting you!”
I suppose I must have winced at her words, and she is quick to observe.
“Go on,” I said; “do not spare me. Tell me everything. It is madness indeed; but we may kill it, when we both know it.”
“Oh, if we could!” she cried, with a poignancy which was heart-breaking to hear. “If we could!”
“Do you doubt our ability?” I said, trying to be patient and calm. “You are unreasoning, like all women. Be sensible for a moment. You do me a wrong in cherishing these feelings. I have the capacity for cruelty in me. I may have been—I have been—cruel in the past, but never to you. You have no right to treat me as you have done lately. If you examine your feelings, and compare them with facts, you will see their absurdity.”
“But,” she interposed, with a woman’s fatal quickness, “that will not do away with their reality.”
“It must. Look into their faces until they fade like ghosts, seen only between light and darkness. They are founded upon nothing; they are bred without father or mother; they are hysterical; they are wicked. Think a little of me. You are not going to be conquered by a chimera, to allow a phantom created by your imagination to ruin the happiness that has been so beautiful. You will not do that! You dare not!”
She only answered:
“If I can help it.”
A passionate anger seized me, a fury at my impotence against this child. I pushed her almost roughly from my arms.