"Surely you do not want to dine in the house?"
"Do you mind?"
"Just as you wish. This is your evening."
But he was not pleased. The prospect of the glaring lights and soiled
linen of the dining-room jarred on his aesthetic sense. He wanted a setting
for himself, for the girl. Environment was vital to him. But when, in the
full light of the moon, he saw the purplish shadows under her eyes, he
forgot his resentment. She had had a hard day. She was tired. His easy
sympathies were roused. He leaned over and ran his and caressingly along
her bare forearm.
"Your wish is my law--to-night," he said softly.
After all, the evening was a disappointment to him. The spontaneity had
gone out of it, for some reason. The girl who had thrilled to his glance
those two mornings in his office, whose somber eyes had met his fire for
fire, across the operating-room, was not playing up. She sat back in her
chair, eating little, starting at every step. Her eyes, which by every
rule of the game should have been gazing into his, were fixed on the
oilcloth-covered passage outside the door.
"I think, after all, you are frightened!"
"Terribly."
"A little danger adds to the zest of things. You know what Nietzsche says
about that."
"I am not fond of Nietzsche." Then, with an effort: "What does he say?"
"Two things are wanted by the true man--danger and play. Therefore he
seeketh woman as the most dangerous of toys."
"Women are dangerous only when you think of them as toys. When a man finds
that a woman can reason,--do anything but feel,--he regards her as a
menace. But the reasoning woman is really less dangerous than the other
sort."
This was more like the real thing. To talk careful abstractions like this,
with beneath each abstraction its concealed personal application, to talk
of woman and look in her eyes, to discuss new philosophies with their
freedoms, to discard old creeds and old moralities--that was his game.
Wilson became content, interested again. The girl was nimble-minded. She
challenged his philosophy and gave him a chance to defend it. With the
conviction, as their meal went on, that Le Moyne and his companion must
surely have gone, she gained ease.
It was only by wild driving that she got back to the hospital by ten
o'clock.
Wilson left her at the corner, well content with himself. He had had the
rest he needed in congenial company. The girl stimulated his interest.
She was mental, but not too mental. And he approved of his own attitude.
He had been discreet. Even if she talked, there was nothing to tell. But
he felt confident that she would not talk.