Nettie hesitated and obeyed. She led the way through one of the hot-houses. It was a low, steamy, brick-floored alley between staging that bore a close crowd of pots and ferns, and behind big branching plants that were spread and nailed overhead so as to make an impervious cover of leaves, and in that close green privacy she stopped and turned on me suddenly like a creature at bay.
“Isn’t the maidenhair fern lovely?” she said, and looked at me with eyes that said, “_Now_.”
“Nettie,” I began, “I was a fool to write to you as I did.”
She startled me by the assent that flashed out upon her face. But she said nothing, and stood waiting.
“Nettie,” I plunged, “I can’t do without you. I—I love you.”
“If you loved me,” she said trimly, watching the white fingers she plunged among the green branches of a selaginella, “could you write the things you do to me?”
“I don’t mean them,” I said. “At least not always.”
I thought really they were very good letters, and that Nettie was stupid to think otherwise, but I was for the moment clearly aware of the impossibility of conveying that to her.
“But then I tramp seventeen miles to say I don’t mean them.”
I think I was at a loss; then I said, not very clearly, “I don’t.”
“You think you—you love me, Willie. But you don’t.”
I made what I thought was a most heroic plunge. “Nettie,” I said, “I’d rather have you than—than my own opinions.”
The selaginella still engaged her. “You think so now,” she said.
“No,” she said shortly. “It’s different now.”
“But why should two letters make so much difference?” I said.
“It isn’t only the letters. But it is different. It’s different for good.”
She halted a little with that sentence, seeking her expression. She looked up abruptly into my eyes and moved, indeed slightly, but with the intimation that she thought our talk might end.
“For good?” said I. “No! . . Nettie! Nettie! You don’t mean that!”
“I do,” she said deliberately, still looking at me, and with all her pose conveying her finality. She seemed to brace herself for the outbreak that must follow.
Of course I became wordy. But I did not submerge her. She stood entrenched, firing her contradictions like guns into my scattered discursive attack. I remember that our talk took the absurd form of disputing whether I could be in love with her or not. And there was I, present in evidence, in a deepening and widening distress of soul because she could stand there, defensive, brighter and prettier than ever, and in some inexplicable way cut off from me and inaccessible.