fierceness of her inflamed his passion, yet he recognized dimly behind
this fierceness an instinct of self-protection--and he thought of her in
this moment as a struggling bird that fluttered out of his hands when
they were ready to close over her. So it had been to-night. He might have
kept her, prevented her from taking the car. Yet he had let her go! There
came again, utterly to blot this out, the memory of her lips.

Even then, there had been something sorrowful in that kiss, a quality he
resented as troubling, a flavour that came to him after the wildness was
spent. What was she struggling against? What was behind her resistance?
She loved him! It had never before occurred to him to enter into the
nature of her feelings, having been so preoccupied with and tortured by
his own. This realization, that she loved him, as it persisted, began to
make him uneasy, though it should, according to all experience, have been
a reason for sheer exultation. He began to see that with her it involved
complications, responsibilities, disclosures, perhaps all of those things
he had formerly avoided and resented in woman. He thought of certain
friends of his who had become tangled up--of one in particular whose bank
account had been powerless to extricate him.... And he was ashamed of
himself.

In view of the nature of his sex experience, of his habit of applying his
imagination solely to matters of business rather than to affairs of the
heart,--if his previous episodes may be so designated,--his failure to
surmise that a wish for marriage might be at the back of her resistance
is not so surprising as it may seem; he laid down, half smoked, his third
cigar. The suspicion followed swiftly on his recalling to mind her
vehement repudiation of his proffered gifts did he think she wanted what
he could buy for her! She was not purchasable--that way. He ought to have
known it, he hadn't realized what he was saying. But marriage! Literally