“Well, I’ll have you know I’m done with men, do you understand? There’s never been one yet that shot straight with me! Look in my eyes, Nathan Forge! Do you see that stabbed look there?”
Nathan looked in her eyes. He saw no stabbed look. But he did see the wild forked light and iris dilations of a rampant neurasthenic. And moreover, if no males had ever shot straight with Bernie, Nathan had a quiet hunch he knew the reason. But Bernie, of course, would have exploded in one grand cataclysm of atomic energy if he had not agreed that he did see a stabbed look in her eyes.
“Men have put that stabbed look there, Nathan Forge! Your sex! Even you have had your part in doing it!”
“Me?” cried the amazed young man.
“You! You, you, you! That day off in the woods—remember it? You bet you remember it! You tempted me to degrade my girlish modesty! You taught me what fascination a woman’s body has upon——”
“Bernice! I——”
“Stop! Not a word! I guess I know! I’ve suffered enough for it! You and your sex are rotten! Rotten! Rotten! And I’m done with it! And yet here you come, sniveling around in your small-town boorishness and dinner clothes, bringing me old love letters, thinking I’d marry you! And what have you done that I should marry you? What are you in the world, anyway—among real men, I mean? What goals have you won? What have you to offer a woman——?”
“I hope I’ve got a reasonable amount of decency——”
The effect on Bernice was a shriek.
“Decency! Oh, my God, what conceit! You’re worse than some of those Los Angeles picture actors I met last summer! ‘A reasonable amount of decency!’ You! Who lived for six years in foul propinquity with a woman you didn’t love——”