Page:Son of the wind.djvu/145

RV 133 sensible either to want always to catch things and break them." A word had slipped out that showed too plainly of what she was thinking, what vision was continually before her eyes.

He curbed his tongue. For the world he would not have startled her out of her unconsciousness.

"Men are always shooting things, or taming them, or controlling them," she went on, vivid with argument, "and they always say they do it because it's reasonable. But I don't believe it is reasonableness that makes them do it. It is just a very strong, blind sort of feeling. They want to and so they will!"

He kept on smiling for quite a long minute, because he was too irritated to venture speech.

"So, you think I am unreasonable?" he said at last. That had been the thorn which had pricked him so deep.

"Oh, not you!" Her eyes shone all their surprise that he could have made such a stupid blunder. "I only meant men in general. You are—" she hung on the pronouncement of his sentence, then let it fall with intense gravity—"you are different."

Every woman who had known him had probably passed the same sentence on him, but now for the first time he really heard it, and at the touching