“You didn’t think I was going to have a strange girl here, the first minute alone with my wife, did you?” he said thickly. “You little fool!”
He caught hold of her roughly and kissed her with a vehemence that startled her. For the first time, Elsie realised something of the possessive rights that marriage with a man of Williams’ type would mean. For a frantic instant she was held in the grip of that sense of irrevocability that even the least imaginative can never wholly escape.
Her panic only endured for a moment.
“Don’t,” she began, as she felt that his embrace had pushed her over-large hat unbecomingly to one side. She was entirely unwarmed by passion, unattracted as she was by the man she had married, and chilled and depressed besides in the raw atmosphere of a pouring wet day in London.
The first sound of her husband’s voice taught her her lesson.
“There’s no ‘don’t’ about it now, Elsie. You remember that, if you please. We’re man and wife now, and you’re mine to do as I please with.”
His voice was at once bullying and gluttonous, and his dry, grasping hands moved over her with a clutching tenacity that reminded her sickeningly of a crab that she had once seen in the aquarium.
Elsie was frightened as she had never in her life been frightened before, and the measure of her terror was that she could not voice it.
She remained absolutely silent, and as nearly as possible motionless, beneath his unskilled caresses. Williams, however, hardly appeared to notice her utter lack of responsiveness. He was evidently too much absorbed in the sudden gratification of his own hitherto suppressed desires.
Presently Elsie said faintly: “Where are we going to?”