Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/46

have much cared if he had. For the man did look as glorious as a deity. But he had the divine originality to tell me that I loved him.

And the veriest squaw in the latest great and gory North American historical novel could n't have acted worse than I did.

For I said I did.

As soon as the words were out of me, I could have killed myself. And when I saw the expression on his face, I could have killed him (that is, I could have if, say, it had been the fashion of my tribe). There never was a civilized woman who had more of the "forest primeval" in her than I, and never one who was less suspected of it. I am thought to be quite a proper person, like other well-bred girls; and the curious thing is that the savage in me never breaks out in improper ways, but only smolders, and sharpens knives, and thinks things, and hums war-cries under its breath—and carries chiffon sunshades, and wears twelve-button gloves and satin slippers or embroidered Mayflowers all the while. And nothing could prove it so well as the fact that my hand and my brain are writing this sentence, putting words together decently and in order, while I have fled into a pathless place and hidden from myself. If he were here this minute, searching my soul with