Guild had taken his pipe out to the fountain, where she could see him through the window, seated on the coping of the pool, smoking and tracing circles in the gravel with a broken twig.
She hurried her notes, called the housekeeper to take them, then, without taking hat or gloves, she went out into the sunshine. The habit, so easily acquired, of being with Guild was becoming a necessity, and neither to herself nor to him had it yet occurred to her to pretend anything different.
There was, in her, an inherent candour, which unqualified, perhaps unsoftened by coquetry, surprises more than it attracts a man.
But its very honesty is its undoing; it fails to hold the complex masculine mind; its attractiveness is not permanent. For the average man requires the subtlety of charm to stir him to sentiment; and charm means uncertainty; and uncertainty, effort.
No effortless conquest means more to a man than friendship. And friendship is nothing new to a man.
But it was new to Karen; she had opened her mind to it; she was opening her heart to it, curious concerning it, interested as she had never before been, sincere about it—sincere with herself.
Never before had the girl cared for a man more than she had cared about any woman. The women she had known had not been inferior in intelligence to the men she knew. And a normal and wholesome mind and heart harbour little sentiment when the mind is busy and the body sound.
But since she had known this man she knew also that he had appealed to something more than her intelligence.
Vaguely realizing this in the crisis threatened by his violence, she had warned him that he was violating something more than friendship.
Then the episode had passed and become only an unquiet memory; but the desire for his companionship had not passed; it increased, strengthening itself with every hour in his company, withstanding self-analysis, self-reproach, defying resentment, mocking her efforts to stimulate every tradition of pride—even pride itself.