XVI
“OH, you give me the willys!”
“My dear Mrs. Compton! How often have you promised me——”
“Well, if you will stare at me like a moonstruck setter dog when I’m trying to think up ’steen synonyms for one old word without looking in the dictionary! I can’t blow up my vocabulary like a paper bag and flirt with you at the same time.”
“I have no desire to flirt with you!” said Professor Whalen with great dignity. “It is quite the reverse. You have been playing with my feelings for months.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I’ve been too set on becoming a real lady before leaving for Europe—haven’t thought about you.”
Professor Whalen turned a deep dull red. His overlapping upper teeth shot forward as if to snap down upon his long rather weak chin. He stared past Ida through the open window. It was May and the snow was melting on the mountains, had disappeared from the streets of Butte; there is a brief springtime in Montana between the snows of winter and the cold rains of June, and today was soft and caressing.
“I’ll tell you what is the matter with you,” said Ida, cruelly. “It’s the spring of the year.”
Whalen sprang to his feet. For the first time in his anæmic life he was furiously angry, and he rejoiced in the sensation. “I wish you were a man,” he stuttered. “I’d beat you. It would do my heart good.”
“If you were a real man you would enjoy beating a woman a long sight more,” goaded Ida, who watched him as a man-eating tigress may watch the squirming victim between her paws. She had fed her vanity and amused herself by playing on the little man’s pale emotions until she was convinced he really was in love with her. Shesuddenly made up her mind to force him to “let go,” and experience the sensation of being made love to feloniously.
“I am not a brute,” announced Whalen, still in the same stifled voice. His face was purple, but he was conscious of a warning whisper that he was in a fair way to lose this remunerative pupil. He dismissed the warning. There is probably no man so insignificant, in whom passion for the imperative woman does not develop abnormally the purely masculine conceit. He may despair in solitude, when devitalised by reaction and doubt, but when in her presence, under her inviting eye, and hurried to a crisis by hammering pulses and scorching blood, he is merely the primitive male with whom to desire is to have.
Ida laughed, a low throaty husky laugh. “If you were,” she said cuttingly, “you might stand a show.”
“It is you that are brutal,” hissed poor Whalen.
Ida leaned back in her chair and looked at him out of half-closed eyes. “What induced you to fall in love with me, anyhow?” she demanded in her sweet lazy voice. Whalen clenched his hands.
“I am a man if I am not a brute. You are the most fascinating woman on earth, and you have deliberately tried to entice me from the path of rectitude I have trod all my life——”
“What’s that?” Ida sat up straight, her brows drawn in an ominous frown.
“I have resisted you until today, but I yield——”
“What the devil are you talking about?”
“I expected to be tormented to the utmost limit. But I have stood all of it that I purpose to stand.” His voice by this time was a subdued roar. “I don’t care whether you love me or not. I don’t think you could love anybody. I have read that sirens never do. But you are an enchantress, and you have shown plainly enough——”
Ida’s frown had relaxed, but her eyes blazed. He misunderstood their expression, as well as the sudden forward thrust of her head. He sprang forward, caught her by the shoulders and kissed her.
“Aw!” Ida’s voice was almost a roar. She leaped to her feet, twirled him about, caught him by the back of his collar and the seat of his trousers, and threw him out of the window as if he had been an offensive dog. She flung his hat and stick after him and slammed the windowdown. Then she stamped her feet in inarticulate rage, and rubbed and bit her mouth. It was one thing to play with a man’s passions and quite another to be defiled by them. Ida seethed with the fierce virtue of a young inexperienced and temperamentally cold woman. For a few moments she used very bad language indeed, and struggled with an impulse to ran after the “little puppy” and whip him in the street. But, remembering that she was making a heroic attempt to be a grande dame, she finally went into her bedroom and washed her face.