"You're different from the men
I've been used to all my life," she went on, and--smiling in a friendly
way--"you often give me a terrifying sense of your being a--a wild man on
his good behavior. But I've come to feel that you're generous and unselfish
and that you'll be kind to me--won't you? And I must make a life for
myself--I must--I must! Oh, I can't explain to you, but--" She turned her
little head toward me, and I was looking into those eyes that the flowers
were like.
I thought she meant her home life. "You needn't tell me," I said, and I'll
have to confess my voice was anything but steady. "And, I repeat, you'll
never regret."
She evidently feared that she had said too much, for she lapsed into
silence, and when I tried to resume the subject of ourselves, she answered
me with painful constraint. I respected her nervousness and soon began to
talk of things not so personal to us. Again, my mistake of treating her as
if she were marked "Fragile. Handle with care." I know now that she, like
all women, had the plain, tough, durable human fibre under that exterior
of delicacy and fragility, and that my overconsideration caused her to
exaggerate to herself her own preposterous notions of her superior
fineness.
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