He could not see that opening yet. The
present game would have to play to some sort of a conclusion
first.
Yet he could not shake from his brain and vision the warm
recollection of those bronze slippers, that clinging gown, and
all the feminine softness and pliancy of Dede in her pretty
Berkeley rooms. Once again, on a rainy Sunday, he telephoned
that he was coming. And, as has happened ever since man first
looked upon woman and called her good, again he played the blind
force of male compulsion against the woman's secret weakness to
yield. Not that it was Daylight's way abjectly to beg and
entreat. On the contrary, he was masterful in whatever he did,
but he had a trick of whimsical wheedling that Dede found harder
to resist than the pleas of a suppliant lover. It was not a
happy scene in its outcome, for Dede, in the throes of her own
desire, desperate with weakness and at the same time with her
better judgment hating her weakness cried out:--
"You urge me to try a chance, to marry you now and trust to luck
for it to come out right. And life is a gamble say. Very well,
let us gamble. Take a coin and toss it in the air. If it comes
heads, I'll marry you.
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