"Wh-h-h-h-y--" He was sure she was mad. Tramping all night! He couldn't let her do this.
She sprang up. She stared down at him in revulsion, her hands clenched. Her voice was hostile as she demanded: "What? Don't you want to? With me?"
He was up beside her, angry, dignified; a man.
"Look here. You know I want to. You're the elegantest--I mean you're--Oh, you ought to know! Can't you see how I feel about you? Why, I'd rather do this than anything I ever heard of in my life. I just don't want to do anything that would get people to talking about you."
"Who would know? Besides, my dear man, I don't regard it as exactly wicked to walk decently along a country road."
"Oh, it isn't that. Oh, please, Istra, don't look at me like that--like you hated me."
She calmed at once, drummed on his arm, sat down on the railing, and drew him to a seat beside her.
"Of course, Mouse. It's silly to be angry. Yes, I do believe you want to take care of me. But don't worry.... Come! Shall we go?"
"But wouldn't you rather wait till to-morrow?"
"No. The whole thing's so mad that if I wait till then I'll never want to do it. And you've got to come, so that I'll have some one to quarrel with.... I hate the smugness of London, especially the smugness of the anti-smug anti-bourgeois radicals, so that I have the finest mad mood! Come. We'll go."
Even this logical exposition had not convinced him, but he did not gainsay as they entered the hall and Istra rang for the landlady. His knees grew sick and old and quavery as he heard the landlady's voice loud below-stairs: "Now wot do they want? It's eleven o'clock. Aren't they ever done a-ringing and a-ringing?"
The landlady, the tired thin parchment-faced North Countrywoman, whose god was Respectability of Lodgings, listened in a frightened way to Istra's blandly superior statement: "Mr. Wrenn and I have been invited to join an excursion out of town that leaves to-night. We'll pay our rent and leave our things here."
"Going off together--"
"My good woman, we are going to Aengusmere. Here's two pound. Don't allow any one in my room. And I may send for my things from out of town. Be ready to pack them in my trunks and send them to me. Do you understand?"
"Yes, miss, but--"
"My good woman, do you realize that your `buts' are insulting?"
"Oh, I didn't go to be insulting--"
"Then that's all.... Hurry now, Mouse!"
On the stairs, ascending, she whispered, with the excitement not of a tired woman, but of a tennis-and-dancing-mad girl: "We're off! Just take a tooth-brush. Put on an outing suit--any old thing--and an old cap."