The expression in her eyes froze.
"You mustn't talk of that," she said.
He turned the conversation. He marveled at the strength she had shown a short while before in their scuffle. She resumed her confiding expression and told him of her girlish achievements—(she said "boyish," for, when she was a child she had always longed to join in the games and rights of the boys).—On one occasion when she was with a little boy who was a head taller than herself she had suddenly struck him with her fist, hoping that he would strike her back. But he ran away yelling that she was beating him. Once, again, in the country she had climbed on to the back of a black cow as she was grazing: the terrified beast flung her against a tree, and she had narrowly escaped being killed. Once she took it into her head to jump out of a first-floor window because she had dared herself to do it: she was lucky enough to get off with a sprain. She used to invent strange, dangerous gymnastics when she was left alone in the house: she used to subject her body to all sorts of queer experiments.
"Who would think it of you now, to see you looking so solemn?…"
"Oh!" she said, "if you were to see me sometimes when I am alone in my room!"
"What! Even now?"
She laughed. She asked him—jumping from one subject to another—if he were a shot.
He told her that he never shot. She said that she had once shot at a blackbird with a gun and had wounded it. He waxed indignant.
"Oh!" she said. "What does it matter?"
"Have you no heart?"