"What would you do, then?"
"I?" he asked, disturbed. "What could I do?"
"Why, I suppose," she said slowly, "you'd have to marry me."
"Then," he rejoined with a laugh, "I should think you'd be scared into prudence by the prospect."
"I am not easily--scared," she said, looking down.
"Not at that prospect?" he said jestingly.
She looked up at him; and he remembered afterward the poise of her small head, and the slow, clear colour mounting; remembered that it conveyed to him, somehow, a hint of courage and sincerity.
"I am not frightened," she said gravely.
Gravity fell upon him, too. In this young girl's eyes there was no evasion. For a long while he had felt vaguely that matters were not perfectly balanced between them. At moments, even, he had felt an indefinable uneasiness in her presence. The situation troubled him, too; and though he had known her from childhood and had long ago learned to discount her vagaries of informality, her manners sans façon, her careless ignoring of convention, and the unembarrassed terms of her speech, his common-sense could not countenance this defiance of social usage, sure to involve even such a privileged girl as she in some unpleasantness.
This troubled him; and now, partly sceptical, yet partly conscious, too, of her very frank liking for himself, he looked at her, perplexed, apprehensive, unwilling to credit her with any deeper meaning than her words expressed.
She had grown pink and restless under his gaze, using her cigarette frequently, and continually flicking the ashes to the floor, until the little finger of her glove was blackened.
But courage characterised her race. It had required more than he knew for her to come into his house; and now that she was there loyalty to her professed principles--that a man and a woman were by right endowed with equal privileges--forced her to face the consequences of her theory in the practise.
She had, with calm face and quivering heart, given him an opening. That was a concession to her essential womanhood and a cowardice on her part; and, lest she turn utterly traitor to herself, she faced him again, cool, quiet, and terror in her heart: "I'd be very glad to marry you--if you c-cared to," she said.
"Marion!"
"Yes?"
"Oh--I--it is--of course it's a joke."
"No; I'm serious."
"Serious! Nonsense!"
"Please don't say that."
He looked at her, appalled.
"But I--but you don't love--can't be in love with me!" he stammered.
"I am."
Gloved hands tightening on either end of her riding-crop, she bent her knee against it, balancing there, looking straight at him.
"I meant to tell you so," she said, "if you didn't tell me first. So--I was rather--tired waiting. So I've told you."