"What do you say?" she asked, having heard a vague murmur through the towel.
"I say you can write if you like." George spoke with a careless smile.
Now, facing her, he put his hands on her damp shoulders. She looked up at him over the towel, leaning her head forward, and suspending action. Her nose was about a foot from his. She saw, as she had seen a hundred times, every detail of his large, handsome and yet time-worn face, every hair of his impressive moustache, all the melting shades of colour in his dark eyes. His charm was coarse and crude, but he was very skilful, and there was something about his experienced, weather-beaten, slightly depraved air, which excited her. She liked to feel young and girlish before him; she liked to feel that with him, alone of all men, her modesty availed nothing. She was beginning to realize her power over him, and the extent of it. It was a power miraculous and mysterious, never claimed by her, and never admitted by him save in glance and gesture. This power lay in the fact that she was indispensable to him. He was not her slave--she might indeed have been considered the human chattel--but he was the slave of his need of her. He loved her. In him she saw what love was; she had seen it more and more clearly ever since the day of their engagement. She was both proud and ashamed of her power. He did not possess a similar power over herself. She was fond of him, perhaps getting fonder; but his domination of her senses was already nearly at an end. She had passed through painful, shattering ecstasies of bliss, hours unforgettable, hours which she knew could never recur. And she was left sated and unsatisfied. So that by virtue of this not yet quite bitter disillusion, she was coming to regard herself as his superior, as being less naïve than he, as being even essentially older than he. And in speaking to him sometimes she would put on a grave and precociously sapient mien, as if to indicate that she had access to sources of wisdom for ever closed to him.
"But don't you think we ought to write?" she frowned.
"Certainly if you like! It won't do any good. You don't suppose her aunt will come down here, do you? And even if she did.... There it is, and there you are!"
"Just let me wipe my shoulders, will you?" she said.
He lifted his hands obediently, and as they were damp he rubbed them on the loose corner of the towel.
"Well," he said, "I must be off, I reckon."
"Shall you see Mr. Boutwood?"
"I might.... I know where to catch him, I fancy."