"I should say you had! Do you suppose my mind isn't busy most of the time remembering your—imprints?"
"Is it?"
"Does it comfort you to know it? Nobody else ever pawed me."
"A nice way to put it!" he remarked.
She shrugged:
"I don't know how it was I first permitted it—came to endure it——" She lifted her grey eyes deliberately, "—invited it ... because I came to expect it—wish for it——" She bit her lip and made a quick gesture with clenched hand. "Oh, Jim, I'm no good! Here I am married, and as nonchalantly unfaithful to my vows as you care to make me——"
She turned abruptly and walked across the lawn toward the willows that fringed the stream, moving leisurely, pensively, her hands linked behind her back. He rejoined her at the willows and they slowly entered the misty belt of trees together.
"If you knew," she said, "what a futile, irresolute, irresponsible creature I am, you wouldn't waste real love on me. There's nothing to me except feminine restlessness, mental and physical, and it urges, urges, urges me to wander frivolously in pursuit of God knows what—I don't! But always my mind is a traveller impatient to go a-gypsying, and my feet beat the devil's tattoo——"
She sprang from the pebbles to a flat river stone projecting from the shore and stood poised, looking out across the rushing water at the mist curling there along the crests of little hurrying waves. A firefly drifted through it; above, unseen, night-hawks called persistently. She turned her head toward him expectantly.
There was room enough on the rock and he stepped to her side.