His fingers tightened on the rounded arms.  He shook her again with a restrained savagery.  If he hurt her she did not flinch, nor did her gray eyes, cloudy now and wistful, waver before the passionate fire in his.

“Sophie,” he went on, “you don’t know what this means to me.  Don’t you care a little?”

“Yes,” she answered slowly.  “Perhaps more than a little.  I’m made that way, I suppose.  It isn’t hard for me to love.  But one doesn’t—­”

“Then why,” he demanded, “why refuse to give me a hope?  Why, if you care in the least, is there no chance for me?  It isn’t just a sudden fancy.  I’ve been feeling it grow and struggling to repress it, ever since I first saw you.  You say you care—­yet you won’t even think of marrying me.  I can’t understand that at all.  Why?”

“Do you want to know?  Can’t you see good grounds why we two, of all people, should not marry?” she asked evenly.  “Can you see anything to make it desirable except a—­a welling up of natural passion?  Don’t hold my arms so tight.  You hurt.”

He released his unthinking grip and stepped back a pace, his expression one of hurt bewilderment at the paradox of Sophie’s admission and refusal.

“We’re at opposite poles in everything,” she went on.  “I don’t believe in the things you believe in.  I don’t see life with your vision at all.  I never shall.  We’d be in a continual clash.  I like you but I couldn’t possibly live with you—­you couldn’t live with me.  I rebel at the future I can see for us.  Apart from yourself, the things you’d want to share with me I despise.  If I had to live in an atmosphere of sermons and shams, of ministerial sanctimoniousness and material striving for a bigger church and a bigger salary, I’d suffocate—­I’d hate myself—­and in the end I’d hate you too.”

A little note of scorn crept into her voice, and she stopped.  When she spoke again her tone had changed, deepened into uncertainty, freighted with wistfulness.

“I’m not good—­not in your sense of the word,” she said.  “I don’t even want to be.  It would take all the joy out of living.  I want to sing and dance and be vibrantly alive.  I want to see far countries and big cities, to go about among people whose outlook isn’t bounded by a forest and a lake shore, nor by the things you set store by.  And I’ll be a discontented pendulum until I do.

“Why,” she burst out passionately, “I’d be the biggest little fool on earth to marry you just because—­just because I like you, because you kissed me and for a minute made me feel that life could be bounded by you and kisses.  You’re only the second possible man I’ve ever seen.  You and Tommy Ashe.  And before you came I could easily have persuaded myself that I loved Tommy.”

“Now you think perhaps you love me, but that you might perhaps care in the same way for the next attractive man who comes along?  Is that it?” Thompson asked with a touch of bitterness.