“I didn’t mean—money——”
“I’ll never accept it,” she whispered fiercely. “I only want you! Don’t you know that I’ve been starved all my life and that you are the first person who ever satisfied me! Can’t you understand what such a man means to me?”
Her amazing intellectual passion for him swept him clean off his feet:
“I’ll never let you go again, never!” he whispered, not very clear as to what he meant.
She clung to his hand in pledge of the pact, every intellectual aspiration excited, thrilled to the spirit by sheerest delight.
As for him, emotions unsuspected and inextricably confused set his youthful brain spinning.
Disbelief, reluctance, fastidiousness, pride, perhaps, and constant mental preoccupation had steered this young man clear of lesser emotions. His few love affairs had been born of a mischievous curiosity. No woman had ever really stirred him,—not even intellectually. Women were agreeable to go about with, amusing to analyse; characters to build on, to create. That was the real rôle they played in his career.
And now, for the first time in his life, emotional impulse had upset his complacent equilibrium, and had incited him to say and do things, the import of which was not very clear to him.
And he hadn’t yet come to his senses sufficiently to analyse the situation and discover what it was all about.
In the darkness, beside her, the charm of her seemed to envelop him progressively—steal stealthily through and through him, stimulating his imagination, exciting his curiosity and a swiftly increasing desire to learn more about her.