But he was too young, and too "easy," and she didn't like his gray flannel shirt; which, laundry being out of the question, he had bought in Fillmore Street almost opposite the undertaker's. "Suppose we correspond for a year? That is, if you must really go so soon." "I must. I want you to go with me." His eyes had turned almost black and he had set his jaw in a way she didn't like at all. In nerving himself to go through the ordeal he had worked up his fermenting mind into a positively brutal mood. "Oh--mercy! I couldn't do that. My people are the most conventional in the world." The situation was getting beyond her. She had not intended to make him propose for at least a week and then he would have been abject and she majestic. She sprang to her feet with a swift sidewise movement that made her limp young body melt into a series of curves; and, standing at bay as it were, looked at him with a little frown. He rose as quickly and she liked the set of his jaw bones less and less. "Are you refusing me outright?" he demanded. "That would be only fair, you know, if I have no chance." "Well.... I think so. That is--" "Do you love another man?" Coquetry flashed back. Nevertheless, she told the exact truth little as she suspected it. "I love myself, and youth, and life, and liberty. What is a man in comparison with all that?" "This." And before she could make another leap he had her in his arms; and under the fire of his lips and eyes she lay inert, intoxicated, her first flash of young passion completely responsive to his. But only for a moment. She wrenched herself away, her face livid, her eyes black with fury. She beat his chest with her fists. "You! You! How I hate you! To think I should have given that to you ... to think that another man should have been the first to kiss me ... I'm in love with another man, I tell you. Why don't you go? I hate myself and I never want to lay eyes on you again. Go! Go! Go!" CHAPTER XV I During the retreat from Mons and again in those black days of March, nineteen-eighteen, Gathbroke's tormented mind snapped from the present and flashed on its screen so startling a resurrection of himself during those last dreadful days in San Francisco that for the moment he was unconscious of the world crashing about him. He saw himself in long days and nights of anguish and despair, of embittered love and baffled passion: youth enjoying one of its divine prerogatives and the fullness thereof! Pacing the floor of his room on Russian Hill, tramping over the mountains across the Bay, doggedly awaiting that sole alleviation of mental suffering in its early stages, a change of scene.