Keegan felt himself being slowly transported. His penitence had faded into less satisfactory emotions toward the middle of the day. A gloom had come over him and his heart had felt weighted. He had at first identified this state of mind as a ghastly premonition of disease as a result of last night's debauch and thought that the depression he felt was his nervous system or something warning him of this fact.
The depression lifted. He sat around the Basine home listening to the chatter of the arriving guests and feeling out of place. He felt that he was wishing for something but couldn't make out what it was. His heart hurt, his head felt heavy. There were aches in him and a feeling of listlessness. More, he couldn't sit still. The room seemed a suffocating place. He was unhappy.
Several hours later it dawned on him with a shock that he was in love with Fanny. The sudden explanation frightened him. He attempted to deny it to himself. The struggle endured a half hour. He surrendered.
When he looked at Fanny again she had undergone a complete change. There was a startling intimacy in her features. Her contours were stamped with an appeal he had never observed before in a woman. The rest of the company sat behind a thin film of politeness and formality. But Fanny sat with him outside this film. The others in the room were blurred as if half hidden. Fanny was distinct. A light seemed to beat upon her. He looked in amazement.
A few hours ago he had noticed nothing. Now he noticed everything ... her dress, her hands, her hair, her eyes, her ankles. He was frightened because it seemed as if someone had invaded the secret world in which he alone lived. He remembered frightenedly that he had lain with his head in her lap, that he had embraced her. There had been something curious about the embrace but he was unable to identify it.
"She felt sorry for me, that's all," he thought and at once all hope ebbed out of him. Yet he continued to look at her and watch her grow more familiar, so familiar that her image seemed to have come into his heart where he could feel it choking him.
A few minutes after entering the kitchen he grew hopeful. He found himself in the position of an intimate—at least by comparison. She was paying no attention to Aubrey. She laughed at his, Keegan's, clumsiness, chided him good-naturedly. She held his hand and, his heart beating wildly, directed him in slicing the bread. When he was drawing the water from the sink faucet she leaned over resting her chin on his shoulder and effected a humorous concern. He felt her body press warmly against him and almost dropped the cut-glass pitcher he was holding. He was being transported.
Out of the corner of his eye he watched the novelist. A sorry fellow with gawky feet and a clumsy-looking face. Keegan vaguely pitied him as he stood around doing his best to horn in on the intimacy between Fanny and himself. He knew how the novelist felt. It seemed to Keegan even that it was he, Keegan, feeling that way, and that the carefully concealed embarassment, the futile chagrin and lameness were his own emotions and not Aubrey Gilchrist's. In an effort to put the defeated rival at his ease, so Keegan regarded him, he tried magnanimously to include him in the little byplay between himself and Fanny.
"Here, you try your hand at this," he offered, handing Aubrey the knife. Fanny pouted.