“I will, dear.  I will.”

Then they were silent.  The carter cracked his whip, shouted to his team, and whistled; and the horses, neither frightened by the whip nor excited by the whistling, drew the big wagon at exactly the same steady pace.

And Mavis felt as if her throat had suddenly enlarged itself and become too big for her collar, while her whole breast was swelling and hardening until it seemed so rigidly immense that it would burst all her garments; it was as if her whole being, together with all the thoughts or memories that it contained felt the expansion of some force that had been long gathering and now swiftly was released.  In all her life she had experienced no such sensations hitherto.  She who had been passive under the desires of others now felt desire active in herself.  It was not only that she wanted pardon, kindness, companionship, the things that she had been so systematically deprived of; she wanted the man himself, the partner, and the mate to whom nature had given her a right.

Abruptly she changed her position, scrambling forward close against him, and put up both her hands to his shoulders.

“Will, stoop your head.  I want to whisper something.”

Then, as soon as he bent toward her, she clasped her hands behind his neck and tried to drag him down in a kiss.

“What yer doin’?  Let me be.”

“No, I won’t.  I won’t.”  She was holding him with all her strength, pulling herself up since she could not pull him down.  “Be nice to me.”  And as he recoiled she thrust forward her upturned face, the cheeks hard and white, the eyes burning, the mouth not quite closing even while she spoke.  “I won’t let you go, till you’ve kissed me and made it up for good an’ all.”

She was acting now as instinctively as any wild animal of the woods.  What had started in the zone of voluntary impulse had now passed into the ruling power of reflexes; every nerve of her body seemed to be thinking for itself, guiding her, and compelling her to struggle for the desired end.  All this nonsense of high-falutin’ morality must be swept aside; if he loved her still, he must admit that he loved her; it must be love or hate, but no more sham and pretense, no more of these half measures that made her a wife when people were looking, and an enemy, a culprit in disgrace, or a sexless business associate, when they two were alone behind drawn blinds.

“Mav, you’re shaming me.  ‘A’ done.  ‘Aarve you tekken leave o’ yer senses?”

She felt him shiver as he resisted her; then in another moment he gripped her round the waist as brutally and violently as if he intended to pitch her out of the wagon, held her to him so fiercely that he crushed all the breath from her lungs, and gave her a long passionate mouth-to-mouth kiss.  And it seemed to her that the strength and brutality of the embrace formed the one supreme gratification that she had been burning to obtain; she wanted to give herself to him as she had never done before, and if he crushed her and broke her and killed her in their joint rapture, she would drink death greedily as something inevitable to all those who empty the deep goblet of love.