Bernie drew a long jagged sigh for breath, stared at him in self-satisfaction, then arose abruptly and crossed the room to the steam radiator. Bending down, she rattled the valve to turn it off. She came back. Nathan was still in his daze. Hands on hips, a slurring sneer on her features, Bernie paused before him contemptuously.
“Look at you!” she snapped. “Just as I say! Sit there and let a woman turn off a steam radiator—never make a single move, or offer to do it for her!”
Again Nathan was taken aback.
“You didn’t ask me,” he defended thickly.
“Ask you! Ask you! And has a woman to ask a man every time she wants a thing done? I can see your father sticking out all over you! All her life your mother had to ask him to get things done. A gentleman would anticipate all a woman’s little whims and desires and please her before she had to ask for them! And you!—you—want to marry me!”
Nathan was sick and getting sicker. More than sick, he felt bruised and bleeding, somehow. Bernice had jabbed the lance of her spleen into his most sensitive feelings of self-consciousness and handicap.
Were all women like this, even the best of them?
Again he had the feeling of holding out his hands to a woman and having them slapped. Slapped? His hands? Bernie was cuffing his hands, his mouth, his ears, belaboring him with blows from which he had no defense, which he could not return because she was woman, The Sex.
“I guess I better go, Bernie,” he whispered huskily after a time.
“That’s right, you piker! Run! Just when you hear the naked truth about yourself, run! It’s like you! It’s just like every man. It’s especially like a Forge, and your father! I understand he didn’t stop running until he got out of the country with a valise of other people’s money! And you ask me to marry you—his son!”