“I hate you, John, and all your ideas. I love my fellow creatures—or most of them—and I can’t help it if you are a tiger and not a human being. I’m not mad; I can trust people with every feeling I have got, and I shall never have any feelings that I shouldn’t like to share with everybody. I don’t mind if I am a Christian—it’s better than suffering from persecution mania, and browbeating me because I’m fond of my father and Aunt Eiley.”
But Miss Lackett did not look very browbeaten as she said this. On the contrary her eyes sparkled, her colour was high and her looks imperious, and she kept tapping the toe of her pointed shoe on the stone floor. Mr. Cromartie was irritated by this tapping, so he said something in a low voice on purpose so that Josephine should not be able to hear it; the only word audible was “browbeating.”
She asked him very savagely what he had said. John laughed. “What’s the use of my talking to you at all if you fly into a rage before you have even heard what I have got to say?” he asked her.
Josephine turned pale with self-control; she glared at a placid lion with such fury that, after a moment or two, the beast got up and walked into the den behind his cage.
“Josephine, please be reasonable. Either you are in love with me or else you are not. If you are in love with me it can’t cost you much to sacrifice other people to me. Since you won’t do that it follows that you are not in love with me, and in that case you only keep me hanging round you because it pleases your vanity. I wish you would choose someone else for that sort of thing. I don’t like it, and any of your father’s old friends would do better than me.”
“How dare you talk to me about my father’s old friends?” said Josephine. They were silent. Presently Cromartie said, “For the last time, Josephine, will you marry me, and be damned to your relations?”
“No! You silly savage!” said Josephine. “No, you wild beast. Can’t you understand that one doesn’t treat people like that? It is simply wasting my breath to talk. I’ve explained a hundred times I am not going to make father miserable. I am not going to be cut off with a shilling and become dependent on you when you haven’t enough money to live on yourself, to satisfy your vanity. My vanity, do you think having you in love with me pleases my vanity? I might as well have a baboon or a bear. You are Tarzan of the Apes; you ought to be shut up in the Zoo. The collection here is incomplete without you. You are a survival—atavism at its worst. Don’t ask me why I fell in love with you—I did, but I cannot marry Tarzan of the Apes, I’m not romantic enough. I see, too, that you do believe what you have been saying. You do think mankind is your enemy. I can assure you that if mankind thinks of you, it thinks you are the missing link. You ought to be shut up and exhibited here in the Zoo—I’ve told you once and now I tell you again—with the gorilla on one side and the chimpanzee on the other. Science would gain a lot.”