Her success disconcerted her. She
listened to the man's impassioned transports of terrible eulogy and even
more awful declarations of love. She was even able to meet his eyes,
oblique, apt to glide away, throwing feral gleams of desire.
"No!" he was saying, after a fiery outpouring of words in which the most
ferocious phrases of love were mingled with wooing accents of entreaty.
"I will have no more of it! Don't you mistrust me. I am sober in my
talk. Feel how quietly my heart beats. Ten times today when you, you,
you, swam in my eye, I thought it would burst one of my ribs or leap
out of my throat. It has knocked itself dead and tired, waiting for this
evening, for this very minute. And now it can do no more. Feel how quiet
it is!"
He made a step forward, but she raised her clear voice commandingly:
"No nearer!"
He stopped with a smile of imbecile worship on his lips, and with the
delighted obedience of a man who could at any moment seize her in his
hands and dash her to the ground.
"Ah! If I had taken you by the throat this morning and had my way with
you, I should never have known what you am. And now I do. You are a
wonder! And so am I, in my way. I have nerve, and I have brains, too.
We should have been lost many times but for me. I plan--I plot for my
gentleman. Gentleman--pah! I am sick of him. And you are sick of yours,
eh? You, you!"
He shook all over; he cooed at her a string of endearing names, obscene
and tender, and then asked abruptly:
"Why don't you speak to me?"
"It's my part to listen," she said, giving him an inscrutable smile,
with a flush on her cheek and her lips cold as ice.
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