“Nan, you are too perverse! I only mean that if you allow yourself to talk to me, and allow me to talk to you, and to make love to you, you might consistently allow me to go further, to take your hand, for instance, without pushing me away when I stand quite respectfully beside you.”
“I see what you mean; I can’t argue, but I think, please, I would rather go on in the same way as before.”
“Very well,” he said ruefully.
“And why do you say ‘make love’?” she harked back after a little. “As though it were just a way of spending the time? Anyway, I think I would rather you did not; we can talk quite well without that, and then you need not think I am hypocritical.”
“You do keep me in order, Nan, don’t you?” he said.
“No, I am often very weak and cowardly.”
“You are only cowardly when you won’t face what is to become of us,” he replied, with more seriousness.
Again she looked startled.
“Oh, please, Linnet, I don’t like talking about that.”
“Well, but, my dear,” he said, “you know quite well that we cannot go on indefinitely as we are at present; you ought to be the first to realise it, with your scrupulous mind always splitting hairs and dwelling on niceties. If it were light come, light go, between us—there a kiss and here an arm round you—it would be different. But you know it is not like that. It is perhaps your very prudery that puts the whole thing on a different footing. Anyway you know that it is a matter of all our lives....”