Stacey and Ethel might have been husband and wife from their nonchalant indifference to conversation. They hardly spoke on the long ride; yet there was no constraint between them. Once he asked her if she was cold, and she said that she was not; and once she observed that there was a bad grade a little way ahead, and he noted idly to himself the absence of self-consciousness with which she admitted to knowing the road.
“I suppose,” he remarked, in a matter-of-fact tone, as they drew near West Boyd, “that I’d better register us as man and wife under some fancy name?”
The girl turned her head toward him slowly. “For my sake or your own?” she inquired coolly.
“For neither. To save the hotel’s face and avoid annoyance for us.”
She nodded, as though satisfied.
She entered the inn unconcernedly, except that she wrinkled her forehead and half closed her strange eyes in the sudden brightness, and she stood with equal unconcern by Stacey’s side while he registered and asked for a room. Yet even he, who was hardly at all curious about her, recognized that her calm was not the mere callousness of the prostitute. It was easy, not hard, and so it seemed to arise not from outer experience—however much experience she might have had—but from an inner indifference to facts. So, at any rate, Stacey thought; then thought no more about it.
When a bell-boy had accompanied them to their room and set down their bags and departed, closing the door upon them, she slipped out of her heavy coat and removed her hat gracefully. But then, at last, she turned slowly to Stacey, who had been standing, watching her. Still in silence, they gazed into each other’s eyes profoundly, as they had, two hours earlier, at dinner. The girl’s mouth trembled. Suddenly they kissed.
“You—you’re—brutal!” she stammered, much later, panting, her face convulsed in a savage ecstasy of delight.
“Well—and you?”