“That’s the trouble,” I faltered in unhappy mortification at my instability of character. “I use it to make other people miserable, and know when I do it--men people and things like that.”
“Sometimes that isn’t fair, is it?” he asked after a minute’s pause. “And yet women will do it. What makes them?”
“I don’t know,” I almost sobbed, but controlled it. “I never knew how wrong it was until you talked to Bill about that snuff-stick girl, and how he ought to feel about her, and influence her not to do other men that way. I’m like her, only I do worse than snuff-sticks; and I enjoy it. No, I know God doesn’t want a woman like that.”
“But perhaps you won’t be like that any more. I don’t believe you could, after tasting to-night’s adventure. You lapped up that situation pretty enthusiastically,” he said gently. But somehow there was a hint of amusement in his voice that set my dreadful temper off for a second, and made me wild to convince him of the depths of my sinfulness. I felt that the occasion demanded his serious attention and not levity.
All my life my temper has been a whirlwind that rose and carried me to the limit of things, and then beyond, without any warning. I thought I was making a confession in a state of religious zeal, but I am afraid it was just the same old rage. Religious zeal often takes these peculiar forms of exaggerated temper, and often never finds itself out. From this you’ll see I’m trying very hard to differentiate myself; but it is difficult.
Then for minutes and minutes, and perhaps hours, I sat there in the dark beside that strange man, and told him things that I had never told anybody living, and some I had never admitted to myself. It came out in a wailing, sobbing volume, and I trembled so that he had to take my cold hand in his, I suppose to keep me from sliding off the rock down into the valley.
I wonder if any woman before ever talked out her whole wild self into a man’s ears? And I wonder if it shook him as it did this one out under the lowering clouds and dark trees? When women habitually reveal themselves to men, it is going to bring social revolution, and they must go slow.
And I did go slow. I tried to be truly considerate of him. I began on a few ridiculous misdemeanors that I am surprised I remembered of myself, such as inconsiderate extraction of money from father by means of unwarranted tantrums, impositions on my dear mother’s loving credulity about some of my hunting forays with Bobby, when I left home riding Lady Gray, side-style, only to fling a leg over Dudley’s Grit two squares down the street, where Bobby was waiting with him for me.
