The passion that overmastered him resolved to overmaster her.
“You can’t get away from me. I love you!”
He thrust his left arm back of her and enveloped her in a huge embrace, seizing her right arm in his hand. Sheila had been embraced by numerous men in her stage career. She had stood with their arms about her at rehearsal and before the public. She had replied to their ardors according to the directions of the manuscript—with shyness, with boldness, with rapture.
At one of the rehearsals of “Uncle Dudley,” indeed, Reben himself, after complaining of Brereton’s manner of clasping Sheila, had climbed to the stage and demonstrated how he wanted Sheila embraced. She had smiled at his awkwardness and thought nothing of it.
But that was play-acting, with people looking on. This was reality, in seclusion. Intention is nearly everything. Then it was business. Now the touch of his hand upon her elbow made her flesh creep; the big arm about her was as repulsive as a python’s coil. She fought away from him in a nausea of hatred. While his muscles exerted all their tyranny over her little body, his lips were pleading, maundering appeals for a little pity, a little love.
She fought him in silence, dreading the scandal of a scream. She wanted none of that publicity. Her silence convinced him that her resistance was not sincere; he thought it really the primeval instinct to put up an interesting struggle and sweeten the surrender.
With a chuckle of triumph he drew her to his breast and thrust his head forward toward the cheek dimly aglow. But just as he would have kissed her she twisted in his clutch and lurched aside, wrenched her right arm free, and bent it round her head to protect her precious flesh. Then as he thrust his head forward again in pursuit of her, she swung her arm back with all her might and drove her elbow into his face.
Some Irish instinct of battle inspired her to swing from waist and shoulder and put her whole weight into the blow. Only his Reben luck saved him from having a mouthful of loose teeth, a broken nose, or a squashed eye. As it was, the little bludgeon fell on his eminent cheek-bone with an impact that almost knocked him senseless amid a shower of meteors.
Reben’s heartache was transferred to his head. His arms fell from her and romance departed in one enormously prosaic “Ouch!”
The victorious little cave-woman cowered aside and rubbed her bruised elbow, and pouted, and felt ashamed of herself for a terrible brute. Then, as the ancient Amazons must undoubtedly have done after every battle, she began to cry.