Part 5
But she did not get away just then.
Ramage's bitterness passed as abruptly as his aggression. "Oh,
Ann Veronica!" he cried, "I cannot let you go like this! You
don't understand. You can't possibly understand!"
He began a confused explanation, a perplexing contradictory
apology for his urgency and wrath. He loved Ann Veronica, he
said; he was so mad to have her that he defeated himself, and did
crude and alarming and senseless things. His vicious abusiveness
vanished. He suddenly became eloquent and plausible. He did make
her perceive something of the acute, tormenting desire for her
that had arisen in him and possessed him. She stood, as it were,
directed doorward, with her eyes watching every movement,
listening to him, repelled by him and yet dimly understanding.
At any rate he made it very clear that night that there was an
ineradicable discord in life, a jarring something that must
shatter all her dreams of a way of living for women that would
enable them to be free and spacious and friendly with men, and
that was the passionate predisposition of men to believe that the
love of women can be earned and won and controlled and compelled.
He flung aside all his talk of help and disinterested friendship
as though it had never been even a disguise between them, as
though from the first it was no more than a fancy dress they had
put quite understandingly upon their relationship. He had set
out to win her, and she had let him start. And at the thought of
that other lover--he was convinced that that beloved person was a
lover, and she found herself unable to say a word to explain to
him that this other person, the person she loved, did not even
know of her love--Ramage grew angry and savage once more, and
returned suddenly to gibe and insult. Men do services for the
love of women, and the woman who takes must pay. Such was the
simple code that displayed itself in all his thoughts. He left
that arid rule clear of the least mist of refinement or delicacy.
That he should pay forty pounds to help this girl who preferred
another man was no less in his eyes than a fraud and mockery that
made her denial a maddening and outrageous disgrace to him. And
this though he was evidently passionately in love with her.
For a while he threatened her. "You have put all your life in my
hands," he declared. "Think of that check you endorsed. There
it is--against you. I defy you to explain it away. What do you
think people will make of that? What will this lover of yours
make of that?"
At intervals Ann Veronica demanded to go, declaring her undying
resolve to repay him at any cost, and made short movements
doorward.
But at last this ordeal was over, and Ramage opened the door.
She emerged with a white face and wide-open eyes upon a little,
red-lit landing. She went past three keenly observant and
ostentatiously preoccupied waiters down the thick-carpeted
staircase and out of the Hotel Rococo, that remarkable laboratory
of relationships, past a tall porter in blue and crimson, into a
cool, clear night.
