Part 5

But she did not get away just then.

Ramage’s bitterness passed as abruptly as his aggression. “Oh,

Ann Veronica!” he cried, “I cannot let you go like this! You don’t

understand. You can’t possibly understand!”

He began a confused explanation, a perplexing contradictory apology for

his urgency and wrath. He loved Ann Veronica, he said; he was so mad

to have her that he defeated himself, and did crude and alarming and

senseless things. His vicious abusiveness vanished. He suddenly became

eloquent and plausible. He did make her perceive something of the acute,

tormenting desire for her that had arisen in him and possessed him.

She stood, as it were, directed doorward, with her eyes watching every

movement, listening to him, repelled by him and yet dimly understanding.

At any rate he made it very clear that night that there was an

ineradicable discord in life, a jarring something that must shatter all

her dreams of a way of living for women that would enable them to be

free and spacious and friendly with men, and that was the passionate

predisposition of men to believe that the love of women can be earned

and won and controlled and compelled.

He flung aside all his talk of help and disinterested friendship as

though it had never been even a disguise between them, as though

from the first it was no more than a fancy dress they had put quite

understandingly upon their relationship. He had set out to win her, and

she had let him start. And at the thought of that other lover--he was

convinced that that beloved person was a lover, and she found herself

unable to say a word to explain to him that this other person, the

person she loved, did not even know of her love--Ramage grew angry

and savage once more, and returned suddenly to gibe and insult. Men do

services for the love of women, and the woman who takes must pay. Such

was the simple code that displayed itself in all his thoughts. He left

that arid rule clear of the least mist of refinement or delicacy.

That he should pay forty pounds to help this girl who preferred another

man was no less in his eyes than a fraud and mockery that made her

denial a maddening and outrageous disgrace to him. And this though he

was evidently passionately in love with her.

For a while he threatened her. “You have put all your life in my hands,”

he declared. “Think of that check you endorsed. There it is--against

you. I defy you to explain it away. What do you think people will make

of that? What will this lover of yours make of that?”

At intervals Ann Veronica demanded to go, declaring her undying resolve

to repay him at any cost, and made short movements doorward.

But at last this ordeal was over, and Ramage opened the door. She

emerged with a white face and wide-open eyes upon a little, red-lit

landing. She went past three keenly observant and ostentatiously

preoccupied waiters down the thick-carpeted staircase and out of the

Hotel Rococo, that remarkable laboratory of relationships, past a tall

porter in blue and crimson, into a cool, clear night.