You've got to do things as though they will be.'
'I suppose so,' she said indifferently. 'And now I must go back.'
He turned obediently and thrust the parcel at her.
'But aren't you going to take me home?' she asked.
'No, I don't think I need do that. I shall stay here.'
'Then I won't have your chocolates. I didn't want them, anyhow, but
now I won't take them.'
'I don't understand you,' he said miserably.
'Doesn't the painter understand his paints or the musician his
instruments? No, you'll have to begin at the beginning, Charles Batty,
and work very hard before you're a success.'
She ran from him fleetly, hardly knowing why she was so angry, but it
seemed to her that he had no right to be content without her love; she
felt he must be emasculate, and the guilty passion of Francis Sales
was, by contrast, splendid. But for that passion, Charles Batty might
have persuaded her she was incapable of rousing men's desire and not
to rouse it was not to be a woman. Accordingly, she valued Francis and
despised the other, yet when she had reached home and run upstairs and
was standing in the dim room where the firelight cast big, uncertain
shadows, like vague threats, on walls and ceiling, she suffered a
reaction.
The scene on the road became sinister: she remembered the strange
silence of the trees and the clangorous barking of the dogs, the
hoarse voices from the encampment in the hollow. It had been very dark
there and an extraordinary blackness had buried her when she was in
that man's arms.
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