Deb balanced one bare tan leg across the knee of the other, clasped her slim ankle caressingly, and dangled a caked and clammy stocking near the fire, which, with the reckless squandering of much paraffin, Cliffe had at last wheedled to a ruddy pyramid.
“I wish you hadn’t tramped me through all the sploshiest fields, Cliffe.”
“‘Where there are cows there is dung!’—simple Russian proverb,” he replied sententiously. “I’m compiling a book of them. Besides, you shouldn’t have forgotten your umbrella.”
“I’ve never had an umbrella.... Think of it—never a little umbrella of my own—and sometimes my arms are empty—oh, so empty.... I have to watch other women dandling their umbrellas ... and wonder why such happiness should have been denied just to me. Sometimes, at night, I dream that I have, after all, one dear little golden-headed umbrella ... and then I wake up to find it all a dream—all a dream——perhaps I shall never have an umbrella now ...” Mournfully she wriggled her toes down into the foot of her stocking.
He watched her from his sprawling posture on the horsehair sofa, and smiled....
“Highly improper conversations.... Wonder if Samson Phillips would approve of it? Does he still write you those compromising letters about running brooks and Ella Wheeler Wilcox?”
“Every Friday. EllaWheelerWilcox sounds like an oath, the way you say it.”
He swung himself upright, striking the pillow-sausage with his fist. “It is an oath. Yes, I might have been a good man if some confiding aunt hadn’t roused my worst passions by a gift of those eleven white, innocent-looking vellum volumes.... ‘And they were wed on a horsehair bed, and the dying day was their priest.’ Deb, would Samson Phillips consider the dying day an adequate priest for you and me?”
“I’ll ask him if you like. I’m a privileged person with Samson; he used to kiss-in-the-ring with me at children’s parties—a very serious young man unbending to play with the little ones—and acquired a taste for me that way.”