“Dora, I’m frightfully gone on you,” affirmed Michael, choking with the emotional declaration. “Are you gone on me?”
“I like you all right,” Dora confessed.
“Well then, do kiss me. You might. Oh, I say, do.”
He leaned over and sought those unresponsive lips that, mutely cold, met his. He spent a long time trying to persuade her to give way, but Dora protested she could not understand why people kissed at all, so silly as it was.
“But it’s not,” Michael protested. “Or else everybody wouldn’t want to do it.”
However, it was useless to argue with Dora. She was willing to put her curly golden head on his shoulder, until he nearly exploded with sentiment; she seemed not to mind how often he pressed his lips to hers; but all the time she was passive, inert, drearily unresponsive. The deeper she seemed to shrink within herself and the colder she stayed, the more Michael felt inclined to hurt her, to shake her roughly, almost to draw blood from those soft lifeless lips. Once she murmured to him that he was hurting her, and Michael was in a quandary between an overwhelming softness of pity and an exultant desire to make her cry out sharply with pain. Yet as he saw that golden head upon his shoulder, the words and tune of ‘Two little girls in blue’ throbbed on the air, and with an aching fondness Michael felt his eyes fill with tears. Such love as his for Dora could never be expressed with the eloquence and passion it demanded.
Michael and Alan had tacitly agreed to postpone all discussion of their passionate adventure until the blackness of night and secret intimacy of their bedroom made the discussion of it possible.
“I say, I kissed Dora this morning,” announced Michael.
“So did I Winnie,” said Alan.
“She wouldn’t kiss me, though,” said Michael.