180
FLAMING
YOUTH
down she tore her frock. ‘Oh, hell!” she cried lamentably. “Are you shocked, Mr. Scott? You don’t like me to swear, do you?” “T like you to be your very self, Pat.”
- Tt’s easy to be that with you. You’re an easy person
te be with,” she meditated.
She stopped under the shelter of a small arbour spanning one of the sideyard paths of Holiday Knoll. Clematis in full glory covered it. The faint, rich odour of its late blossoming, dewy and fresh and virginal as if the aging year, after all its fecund maternity of summer, had again put forth its claim to imperishable maidenhood in the blooms, enveloped them. She turned upon him the slant challenge of her eyes from beneath the clouding mass of hair. “Do
you truly like me,” she wheedled,
“better than
Cissie?” As if the words were torn from the depths of him and forced through his constricted throat, he answered: “T’m mad about you.” “‘Oh-h-h-h-h,” she crooned, and there was both dismay
and delight inthe sound. “I didn’t want you to say that.” “T didn’t want to say it,” he muttered. “I didn’t mean to say it.” He stared intently before him; his brain felt numb. There was an appalled sense of inner catastrophe, wholly unforeseen, inherent in the impossible situation. “Oh, why did you have to go and say it?” she wailed in childish resentment. “It spoils everything.” He made no reply. Her intonation changed, became daring and seductive, “It’s just a—a—sort of fatherly interest, isn’t it?” “No.”
“Now you’re angry.
But it ought to be.”
