It was the next night that she reverted to the matter, the fluent voluptuousness of her body still tingling from the harsh tenderness of his arms. "You're a funny boy.... What you said last night...."
"I said so much!"
Her thought could not be laughed away. "About your keeping straight, you know.... I have a friend—she only married last Mardi Gras—who always insisted she wanted a man who had had experience.... Girls have queer notions, haven't they?"
"I should think the girl would feel soiled ... that way. I should hate to have my mind filled, on my wedding night, comparing the wonderful girl I had won ... with ... other women I had had."
The perverse infidelity shook him again. "And yet I kiss." He turned the word into fact.
"There's no logic in it," he persisted, his body eased with the lip-contact. "Kissing shouldn't be wasted, any more than the rest. It's only a prelude to the more wonderful finale...."
"I enjoy the prelude," she temporized, in lazy content.
"And afterwards——" he breathed on his hand pausing fearfully on the tantalizing silken softness of her cool ankle, then straying with restrained gusto toward the edge of the lacy fabric above.
"No," she smiled. He solaced an obedient spirit with the touch of the denying lips.
The next afternoon he never forgot. They started early for Shadow Mountain, promising the Tollivers to return with mountain azalea, if it was still blooming. She dismissed this as an excuse.