"My God, what has happened to me?... What is this that has happened to me?" she asked. Lacing her fingers hard together, she kept murmuring: "What is it?... My God!... what is it?"
She felt ridiculous and abased in her own sight; but the glamour was stealing over her again. "It is impossible ... utterly impossible!" she kept telling herself. Yet at the bottom of it all, shining up through darkling depths, was that fairy-gold of joy, like the gold crown on the head of the frog in the folk tale. Recalling this old fable of her childhood, she laughed unwillingly. It was a wry laugh, indeed. "Yes," she told herself, "a frog with a gold crown—that is what this craziness amounts to.... I am ridiculous ... ridiculous...!" She looked harshly at her reflection in the mirror. "You are ridiculous," she said to it.
But there was more than her own absurdity to think of—there was Loring. She had to consider him. And at the mere thought of him, again came that frantic blush submerging her. What so ravaged her was the thought that this wild, unreal feeling could not be love. Then she had kissed him, had let him kiss her unworthily. She felt as though falling headlong down abysses in her own nature of which she had never dreamed. Had she, then, a wanton streak in her? Was she of that most contemptible breed of mature women who like to scorch themselves delicately at the fires of youth?
This so horrified her that she dropped into a chair, feeling physically faint. She sat there so long that Mammy Nan put her head in at the door and said severely: "Miss Sophy, yo' coffee's gettin' corpse-cold. Dee bell done rang twict...."
Sophy obeyed the stern voice of Mammy Nan, from the instinct of a hectored childhood. She rose at once and went meekly to drink the coffee that she did not want. She actually ate a waffle under the tyrannical gaze of her old nurse. It was like trying to swallow a bit of flannel. She rebelled suddenly, and, laying down her knife and fork, said: "I'm not hungry this morning, Mammy—I can't eat."
With this she went to her study—and found Loring standing before the fire. How it happened, Sophy could not tell; but like a homing-pigeon she went to him, and her head was on his breast, and his arms around her without a word spoken. And as his arms went round her, she knew suddenly that she was deathly tired. She also knew quite simply that, ridiculous, impossible, fantastic as it might be, she loved him. This knowledge was so soothing after the terrible idea that had come to her a little while ago—the sick fear that her kiss had been only of the senses, no matter how superfined—that she leaned against him in a sort of rapture of repose. For the moment she was safe—afterwards the deluge. This reassurance of her finer nature made all else seem trivial for the time being. She loved him. She, the mature, bitterly experienced woman, loved this youth! Well—it was ridiculous, but it was not unworthy. The higher gods might laugh, but they could not turn from her in disgust.
"My Beautiful ... my Beautiful!..." Loring was murmuring, his lips against her hair.
That keen, fresh, wholesome scent of horse and leather and outer air brought the past night back to her in one blinding flare. She stood so silent that he began to laugh, low and nervously.
"I didn't sleep a wink all night, Selene.... I was with you in some queer way. Did you feel me?... Or ... did you sleep?"
"No, dear...."