She approached the tent, raising with her two hands the edge of her long tunic, putting in her gestures an almost lascivious grace, as though suddenly invaded by languor.
"Shall I?"
She stooped a little to enter the tent. Under the abundance of snowy folds, her thin and flexible body had movements of feline grace, exhaled a heat and odor which spurred strangely the disturbed sensibility of the young man. And, while she stretched herself out on the mat beside him, there fell all around his flaming face a shower of hair, still wet with salt water, and through which shone the white of her eyes and the red of her lips, like fruits among foliage.
In her voice, as on her face, as in her smile, there was a shadow, an infinitely mysterious and fascinating shadow. It seemed as if she divined her lover's secret hostility, and was getting ready to triumph over it.
"What are you looking at?" she asked with a sudden start. "No, no; don't look at them! They are ugly."
She withdrew her feet, hid them under the folds of her peignoir.
"No, no. I forbid you."
She was vexed and ashamed for a moment; she frowned, as if she had surprised in George's eyes a spark of the cruel truth.
"Unkind man!" she said again, in an ambiguous tone of pleasantry and rancor.
He replied, rather enervated: