I was not trying to be inflexible, nor to harden my heart against her. It was hardened by passion, which at no time is an inspirer of tenderness, and mine had been sufficiently irritated through four months of alternate excitation and resistance to be determined now. My difficulty was not to avoid being too tender, but to check myself from being too harsh. Had I heard my own words in cool blood they might have seemed hard, and my insistence inconsiderate and blamable, but my calm was only artificial, and my judgment little else than a blind clinging to the object with which I had come.
"Why can't you go away for a time and then we can marry later, when you come back?" she answered, in a weak, evasive tone.
"It is not wholly a question of being away from you," I returned. "So long as I am engaged to you, Lucia, my whole life is totally different from that which it would be if I were not."
"I give you permission to lead any life you please," she said vehemently.
"Thank you!" I thought, sarcastically; "but your permission has nothing to do with it."
"It is useless to discuss the matter," I said aloud. "I cannot argue the point with you; I have said there is no third alternative."
"I think you are most unkind," and Lucia let two lovely arms and hands sink over the sides of the chair in gesture of weak despair.
I noticed, indifferently, that she was unnaturally pale.
"If you consent to our marriage, Lucia," I urged, pressing that alluring waist, "I will promise this, if it will simplify matters—you shall continue to live as if you were unmarried until you yourself put things on another footing."
She glanced at me quickly, as I spoke, with an unexpressed surprise.