Lucky for her that Wilson had stopped in the bar, that Sidney's
instinctive good manners forbade her staring, that only the edge of the
summer moon shone through the trees. She went white and clutched the
edge of the table, with her eyes closed. That gave her quick brain a
chance. It was madness, June madness. She was always seeing him even in
her dreams. This man was older, much older. She looked again.
She had not been mistaken. Here, and after all these months! K. Le
Moyne, quite unconscious of her presence, looked down into the valley.
Wilson appeared on the wooden porch above the terrace, and stood, his
eyes searching the half light for her. If he came down to her, the man
at the next table might turn, would see her--
She rose and went swiftly back toward the hotel. All the gayety was
gone out of the evening for her, but she forced a lightness she did not
feel:--
“It is so dark and depressing out there--it makes me sad.”
“Surely you do not want to dine in the house?”
“Do you mind?”
“Just as you wish. This is your evening.”
But he was not pleased. The prospect of the glaring lights and soiled
linen of the dining-room jarred on his aesthetic sense. He wanted a
setting for himself, for the girl. Environment was vital to him. But
when, in the full light of the moon, he saw the purplish shadows under
her eyes, he forgot his resentment. She had had a hard day. She was
tired. His easy sympathies were roused. He leaned over and ran his and
caressingly along her bare forearm.
“Your wish is my law--to-night,” he said softly.
After all, the evening was a disappointment to him. The spontaneity had
gone out of it, for some reason. The girl who had thrilled to his glance
those two mornings in his office, whose somber eyes had met his fire for
fire, across the operating-room, was not playing up. She sat back in her
chair, eating little, starting at every step. Her eyes, which by every
rule of the game should have been gazing into his, were fixed on the
oilcloth-covered passage outside the door.
“I think, after all, you are frightened!”
“Terribly.”
“A little danger adds to the zest of things. You know what Nietzsche
says about that.”
“I am not fond of Nietzsche.” Then, with an effort: “What does he say?”
“Two things are wanted by the true man--danger and play. Therefore he
seeketh woman as the most dangerous of toys.”
“Women are dangerous only when you think of them as toys. When a man
finds that a woman can reason,--do anything but feel,--he regards her
as a menace. But the reasoning woman is really less dangerous than the
other sort.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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