He made a vehement gesture of denial. “Oh, no!” But she would not allow him to finish. “But I did,” she announced in a hard, determined voice. “It isn't necessary for you to be polite; I don't care a damn for that sickening sort of thing. I did, and you are properly and modestly retreating. I believe that you think I am--'designing,' isn't that the word? that you might have to marry me. A kiss, I am to realize, is something sacred. Bah! you make me ill, like almost everything else in life.
“If you think for a minute that it was anything more than the expression of a passing impulse you are beyond words. And, if it had been more, you--you violet, I wouldn't marry you; I wouldn't marry any man, ever! ever! ever! I might have gone to Italy with you, but probably come home with some one else--will that get into your pretty prejudices?”
“If you had gone to Italy with me,” he declared sullenly, “you would never have come home with anybody else.”
“That sort of thing has been dismissed to the smaller rural towns and the cheap melodramas; it's no longer considered elevated to talk like that, but only pitiful. You will start next on 'God's noblest creation,' and purity, and the females of your family. Don't you know, haven't you been told, that the primitive religious rubbish about marriage has been laughed out of existence? Did you dream that I wanted to _keep_ you? or that I would allow you to keep me after the thing had got stale? It makes me cold all over to be so frightfully misunderstood. Oh, its unthinkable! Fi, to kiss you! wasn't it loose of me?”
Her contemptuous periods stung him in a thousand minute places. “I told you,” he retorted hotly, “that I wanted to make money; I don't want it given to me; it's for my wedding.”
“Of course, how stupid of me not to have guessed--the lips sacred to her,” her own trembled ever so slightly, but her scornful attitude, her direct, bright gaze, were maintained, “A knight errant adventuring for a village queen with her handkerchief in his sleeve and tempted by the inevitable Kundry.”
He settled himself to weathering this feminine storm; he owed her all the relief to be found in words. “I wanted the money to go West,” he particularized further. “There's a position waiting for me--”