Redmain
could keep on a horse's back if he tried!" Sepia looked, half
asleep. Her eyes grew wider. Her sleepiness vanished.
"Something is wrong with the proud yeoman!" she said. "He is
either mad or in love, probably both! We shall hear more of this
morning's ride, Hesper, as I hope to die a maid!--That's a man I
should like to know now," she added, carelessly. "There is some
go in him! I have a weakness for the kind of man that
_could_ shake the life out of me if I offended him."
"Are you so anxious, then, to make a good, submissive wife?" said
Hesper.
"I should take the very first opportunity of offending him--
mortally, as they call it. It would be worth one's while with a
man like that."
"Why? How? For what good?"
"Just to see him look. There is nothing on earth so scrumptious
as having a grand burst of passion all to yourself." She drew in
her breath like one in pain. "My God!" she said, "to see it come
and go! the white and the red! the tugging at the hair! the tears
and the oaths, and the cries and the curses! To know that you
have the man's heart-strings stretched on your violin, and that
with one dash of your bow, one tiniest twist of a peg, you can
make him shriek!"
"Sepia!" said Hesper, "I think Darwin must be right, and some of
us at least are come from--"
"Tiger-cats? or perhaps the Tasmanian devil?" suggested Sepia,
with one of her scornful half-laughs.
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