One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
absurdest of postures, and not absolutely secure for all that.
His head shook. ‘Friends, you’ll find best.’
‘Well!’ she sighed, ‘I feel I’m doomed to go famished
through life. There’s never to be such a thing as, love, for me!
I can’t tell you no woman could: though you’ll say I’ve told
enough. I shall burn with shame when I think of it. I could
go on my knees to have your arms round me once. I could
kill myself for saying it!—I should feel that I had one moment
of real life.—I know I ought to admire you. They say a
woman hates if she’s refused. I can’t: I wish I were able to. I
could have helped the Radnors better by staying here and
threatening never to go to him unless he swore not to do
them injury. He’s revengeful. Just as you like. You say “Go,”
and I go. There. I may kiss your hand?’
‘Give me yours.’
Dartrey kissed the hand. She kissed the mark of his lips.
He got himself away, by promising to see her to the train for
Paris. Outside her door, he was met by the reflection, coming
as a thing external, that he might veraciously and successfully
have pleaded a passionate hunger for breakfast: nay,
that he would have done so, if he had been downright in
earnest. For she had the prettiness to cast a spell; a certain
curve at the lips, a fluttering droop of the eyelids, a corner of
the eye, that led long distances away to forests and nests.
This little woman had the rosy-peeping June bud’s plumpness.
What of the man who refused to kiss her once? Cold
antecedent immersion had to be thanked; and stringent vacuity;
perhaps a spotting ogre-image of her possessor. Some
sense of right-doing also, we hope. Dartrey angrily attributed
his good conduct to the lowest motives. He went so far
as to accuse himself of having forborne to speak of breakfast,
from a sort of fascinated respect for the pitch of a situation
that he despised and detested. Then again, when beginning
to eat, his good conduct drew on him a chorus of the jeers of
all the martial comrades he had known. But he owned he
would have had less excuse than they, had he taken advantage
of a woman’s inability, at a weak moment, to protect
herself: or rather, if he had not behaved in a manner to protect
her from herself. He thought of his buried wife, and the
noble in the base of that poor soul; needing constantly a
present helper, for the nobler to conquer. Be true man with
a woman, she must be viler than the devil has yet made one,
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