"I told you that he did not harm me. His rough embrace was hard to endure, but it was over in a moment and an embrace is not a ravishment. A thing like that can happen to any woman, and often does. It need not cause you torment. And he has paid, hasn't he? You have avenged me to the full, although you killed him for a different reason."
"I believe I would have killed him for that reason alone if I had known about it."
"You are very jealous, my darling, very hot-headed. No man, no matter how much of a brute he may be, deserves to die if he merely seizes a woman briefly and presses rough kisses upon her lips, however unwelcome those kisses may be. I do not feel that I have been seriously soiled or degraded. He was a coward and his cowardice recoiled upon himself. He was afraid that I would betray him to the Monitors. If I could offer proof that he had made me pregnant his fate would have been sealed along with ours."
The man's face was deathly pale now. "Do you have to talk like that? Do you have to say such things? You know what it does to me."
"I simply wished to make you realize that you are torturing yourself quite needlessly. I remain a virgin still. We are new to love, darling—you and I. We have never experienced the full glory of it, not in an intimate way. Because I am new to love I speak perhaps with too much candor. I do not even know how to choose the right words, the delicate words that a woman should perhaps use when she speaks of such matters. I do not know—I am not sure. There is so much in the old books that I do not completely understand. You must teach me, darling, teach me the exact meaning of the forbidden words and just what words a woman should choose."
He stood looking at her for a moment in complete silence, the color coming back into his face, his eyes on her young, full-bosomed beauty. He could not take his eyes from the twin mounds of her firm, tip-tilted breasts and the rosy pinkness that suffused her exquisite throat.
"I will teach you the meaning of more than just the words," he said. "There is so much that I should like to teach you if you are willing to be taught. We are new to love, as you have said, but I feel, somehow, that I know more about it than you do."
"Are you saying that because you are a man?" she asked, and her voice held a tantalizing hint of mockery.
"I'm not sure," he said. "But I do feel that. What does it matter? Do you really wish to know more?"
Her eyes answered for her, increasing in brightness and tenderness, fastening on his face with a look of surrender and appeal.