Their Moods
"Forgive me, Rosemary--I'm a brute. I have no right to inflict my moods upon you."
"Why not? Don't I bring mine to you?"
"Sometimes--not often."
"Let's get them out where we can look them over," she suggested, practically. "What do you hate most?"
"Grapes," he replied, readily, "and then children who aren't interested in the alphabet. All day I've been saying: 'See the cat. Can the cat run? Yes, the cat can run.' Of course they could repeat it after me, but they couldn't connect it in any way with the printed page. I sympathised strongly with an unwashed child of philosophical German lineage who inquired, earnestly: 'Teacher, what's the good of dat?'"
"What else do you hate?"
"Being tied up. Set down in one little corner of the world and being obliged to stay in it. I know to a certainty just what's going to happen to-morrow and next day and the day after that. Point out any day on the calendar, months ahead, and I can tell you just what I'll be doing. Nothing is uncertain but the weather."
His Looks
"Some people pray for anchorage," she said.
"I never have," he flashed back. "I want the open sea--tide and tempest and grey surges, with the wind in my face and the thrill of danger in my heart! I want my blood to race through my body; I want to be hungry, cold, despairing, afraid--everything! God, how I want to live!"
He paced back and forth restlessly, his hands in his pockets. Rosemary watched him, half afraid, though his mood was far from strange to her. He was taller than the average man, clean-shaven, and superbly built, with every muscle ready and even eager for use. His thirty years sat lightly upon him, though his dark hair was already slightly grey at the temples, for his great brown eyes were boyish and always would be. In the half-light, his clean-cut profile was outlined against the sky, and his mouth trembled perceptibly. He had neither the thin, colourless lips that would have made men distrust him, nor the thick lips that would have warned women to go slowly with him and to watch every step.
With obvious effort, he shook himself partially free of his mood. "What do you hate?" he asked, gently.
"Brown alpaca, sassafras tea, the eternal dishes, the scrubbing, the endless looking for dust where dust would never dare to stay, and--" She paused, and bit her lips.