Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/447



To begin with there was the dashing outline sketch of the first two or three days when, in a few bold lines, he had seemed to set up the figure on the canvas; the rescue of the swallow; justice for the cat; that first walk and homesick talk about Ashley, and at the end those stammering words of his which had seemed to show—Oh, that had now turned unreal to Marise! He couldn't have said that—and meant it!

Then the soirée, the impression of force and originality he had made on the people he had met there, her natural certainty that he must of course have calculated that impression in order to profit by it—and then—at this recollection, Marise always laughed silently at her own astonishment when he had called Donna Antonia "a bad-tempered, stupid old woman." Donna Antonia certainly was that, and every one knew it. But nobody else would dream of saying it out loud, any more than they would give their honest impression of the ritual of a secret society.

And then, just when she had been so drawn towards him by his strength and kindness—that brusk blow in the face. Marise had felt many times before this a thin, keen blade slipped into her back by a hand that took care to be invisible. But never before had she encountered open roughness. It was staggering! Breath-taking! Always, as she remembered it, her first thought was, as it had been then, a horrified wonder why any one should wish to hurt her. Always afterward with the memory of his dreadful, stammering distress, his remorseful kissing of her hands, his helpless inability to unsay what he had said, she knew once more, as she had known then, that she had encountered something new, something altogether different from any human relationship she had ever known, a relationship where you did not say things in order to please or displease people, or to make this or that impression, but because you thought they were true. That was