Page:So Big (1924).djvu/357

 “This calm of your—this effortlessness,” he said to her one day, “is a pose, isn’t it?” Anything to get her notice.

“Partly,” Dallas had replied, amiably. “It’s a nice pose though, don’t you think?”

What are you going to do with a girl like that!

Here was the woman who could hold him entirely, and who never held out a finger to hold him. He tore at the smooth wall of her indifference, though he only cut and bruised his own hands in doing it.

“Is it because I’m a successful business man that you don’t like me?”

“But I do like you.”

“That you don’t find me attractive, then.”

“But I think you’re an awfully attractive man. Dangerous, that’s wot.”

“Ob, don’t be the wide-eyed ingénue. You know damned well what I mean. You've got me and you don’t want me. If I had been a successful architect instead of a successful business man would that have made any difference?” He was thinking of what his mother had said just a few years back, that night when they had talked at her bedside. “Is that it? He’s got to be an artist, I suppose, to interest you.”

“Good Lord, no! Some day I'll probably marry a horny-handed son of toil, and if I do it'll be the horny hands that will win me. If you want to know, I like ’em with their scars on them. There’s something about a man who has fought for it—I don’t know what it is—a look in his eye—the feel of his hand. He