"Would you like to see me—the other way?" he suddenly asked her, in a changed voice. He would have recalled that question, even as he would have held back the quick wave of recklessness that swept over him, if it had been in his power. Her words had sent the blood bounding back to his heart. For the first time she sat before him a living, breathing, alluring woman, and not the embodiment of all that was coldly intellectual. She seemed no longer the pale apostle of letters, but herself a woman throbbing and pulsing with mature life, eager, significant, almost challenging. And he, too, was a man, vigorous, full-blooded, not without his wayward impulses of the heart. The scholar in him, the dormant sense of propriety which rebelled against any disregard of the laws of the strong to the weak, of the host to his guest, had hitherto held a coldly restraining hand on him. She, like himself, was a being surging with desires and emotions, warm with forgotten moods and passions. And again he felt a flushing wave of irresponsibility sweep through him.
"Yes," she answered deliberately, pouring the last of the wine into his glass and sipping languidly at her own with her thin, gently curved, crimson lips. She waited for him to speak, but he was silent.
"I believe I'd love to shock you," she murmured in her fluty contralto. She was looking at him warmly now, with eyes that seemed golden green under the soft glow of the heavily shaded chandelier above their heads. Her hair was a crown of tangled gold. Her face seemed heavy, like a flower in the heat that comes before rain. A sudden tingling swept through all his nerves, and he looked at her with new eyes. At last he had awakened.
"Yes, what good chums we could have been," he said, it seemed to her almost regretfully.
"'But how interesting one man and one woman can make life,'" she answered slowly.
The sentence was a quotation from the second chapter of The Unwise Virgins as Cordelia had first written it. He remembered the line and the context, and it left him no room for doubt.
"There—there could be no going back," he said, feeling the old ground sinking abysmally from under his feet, and groping out in that last tumultuous moment for something substantial to which to cling. O doubting and pouting Adonis, how could you!
The flags and pennons of victory flamed softly in her triumphant eyes. In some way, she felt, she had at last drawn him down from his towers. Once she had been half afraid of him; that hour was gone for all time.
Cordelia slipped out of her chair and came over and stood close beside him. She thrust her pale fingers into his hair and gazed with mild but unhesitatingly candid eyes down into his own. His face looked up to hers, passionate, yet with a touch of pain. A sudden pallor swept over him, and before she knew it he had flung up his arms and drawn her down to him.
Some sudden enchaining fragrance and warmth about her overmastered him. For an intoxicating moment he could feel her very heart, in its wild beating. Then she writhed and twisted away from him, and shrank panting and frightened out of his reach. He went to her once, but she eluded him. And at last he remembered.