against accepting things because he
was expected to; but, like most executant artists, he was no reasoner,
just a mere instinctive kicker against the pricks. He would lose himself
in delight with a sunset, a scent, a tune, a new caress, in a rush of
pity for a beggar or a blind man, a rush of aversion from a man with
large feet or a long nose, of hatred for a woman with a flat chest or an
expression of sanctimony. He would swing along when he was walking, or
dawdle, dawdle; he would sing and laugh, and make her laugh too till
she ached, and half an hour later would sit staring into some pit of
darkness in a sort of powerful brooding of his whole being. Insensibly
she shared in this deep drinking of sensation, but always gracefully,
fastidiously, never losing sense of other people's feelings.

In his love-raptures, he just avoided setting her nerves on edge,
because he never failed to make her feel his enjoyment of her beauty;
that perpetual consciousness, too, of not belonging to the proper and
respectable, which she had tried to explain to her father, made her set
her teeth against feeling shocked. But in other ways he did shock her.
She could not get used to his utter oblivion of people's feelings, to
the ferocious contempt with which he would look at those who got on his
nerves, and make half-audible comments, just as he had commented on her
own father when he and Count Rosek passed them, by the Schiller statue.
She would visibly shrink at those remarks, though they were sometimes
so excruciatingly funny that she had to laugh, and feel dreadful
immediately after. She saw that he resented her shrinking; it seemed to
excite him to run amuck the more. But she could not help it. Once she
got up and walked away. He followed her, sat on the floor beside her
knees, and thrust his head, like a great cat, under her hand.

"Forgive me, my Gyp; but they are such brutes. Who could help it? Now
tell me--who could, except my Gyp?" And she had to forgive him. But, one
evening, when he had been really outrageous during dinner, she answered:

"No; I can't. It's you that are the brute. You WERE a brute to them!"

He leaped up with a face of furious gloom and went out of the room. It
was the first time he had given way to anger with her. Gyp sat by the
fire, very disturbed; chiefly because she was not really upset at having
hurt him. Surely she ought to be feeling miserable at that!

But when, at ten o'clock, he had not come back,