“What is it but a Chink? They expect it! Why, down in Tulare—” His voice fell away as though he recognized the futility of an attack in this form. She spoke:
“It is you who should not expect it.” And then, “I am sorry I said what I did. It was an impulse. We are all imperfect. I’ve often been unkind myself.”
Bertram stood gripping the rail before him as one caught and held by a new emotion. When he spoke, his voice was low and rather hard. At the first tone of it, she shrank from the daimon in him.
“If you only cared enough to call me down! That’s the trouble with you. Am I—am I the dirt under your feet?”
“Oh, don’t please!” But he was going on, too fast to be stopped.
“I’m afraid of you—that’s what’s the matter. What have you got in you that I can’t seem to melt? You kept away from me the 173 first time ever I saw you. You’ve kept away ever since. You don’t think I’m as good as you—and I’m not. But it’s aggravating—it’s damned aggravating—to have you rub it in. You’ve got something about you that I can’t touch anywhere.” And he paused, as though expecting her to deny it.
“I don’t know what right you have to say this,” she exclaimed.
In her swift rush to her own defence, she had dropped her guard. She realized it on the moment, heard his inevitable reply before he opened his mouth to the swift-flashing answer which, that outer self told her, was the only possible answer for him to make.
“Only this right. I’m in love with you. I’ve been in love with you ever since I saw you down at the Judge’s ranch, only I didn’t know it then. I love you.” Silence for a moment, and then, “I love you!”
For just one instant, it seemed to her that she was swaying toward him in spite of herself. He made, curiously, no active motion toward her. That outer self of Eleanor’s, reigning as always over her conscious self, commenting, criticising, seeing—that outer self remembered, above her mental turmoil, 174 that never in all their later acquaintance had he tried even to touch her finger.