“But you ain’t really going?”
“Yerss.”
“But—here—going?”
“Yerss.”
“Well....” She looked at him, then lifted a delicate finger and pulled his ear. “Well ... you damn fool!”
And somehow he felt that he was.
He felt it so keenly that it seemed to be up to him to repudiate the soft impeachment. So, whenever Tom the Tinker was professionally busy, Ding-Dong, blond and beautiful and strong as some jungle animal, would come to the cottage, and many delirious hours would be passed in the company of the lonely, lovable Myra.
He began to be happy. He began to feel that he really was a man. He was asserting himself. He had stolen another man’s wife—sure cachet of masculinity. At the same time he had done nothing dirty, since the man in question didn’t want her; had, indeed, often said so in casual asides, uttered in the intervals of driving steel drills through the walls of iron safes.
Yes, Ding-Dong had shown that he was a real man all right; one who could throw himself about with the best. Morally, he swaggered. He thought of the maidens he had loved: poor stuff. He thought of his pals who either were married or did not love at all: poor stuff entirely. It was himself and those like him who were the men. Masculinity, virility only arrived with intrigue.
Myra learned to love him furiously, idiotically. She would have died for him. She knew by the very beat of her pulses when he stood a little away from her that this was her man; this and no other. Come what might of dismay and disaster, this was the man ordained for her. And he ... did he love her? I wonder. In his own naïve, cleanly simple way he centred his existence on her, but it was rather because she was to him Adventure; fire and salt and all swiftly flavoured things.