“Last night I lay awake listening to a nightingale; your voice was in that bird’s throat.... The rushes bending in the wind this afternoon were like your supple body.... I sometimes think your soul is in my hands.”
It was impossible not to be pleased by these phrases that her mean little soul could only half understand, but her pleasure was tinged with contempt.
Sobraji did not make love in that way. He wrote no letters. When he met her at night he whispered amorous indecencies in her ear which made her laugh and laugh.
Nearly every sentence began with: “How I would like to ...!” and there was no end to the ingenious ways of love his cunning mind devised.
But she had kept her body untouched by both men. Though love was heady and intoxicating, she was too calculating, too distrustful, to give her body: when the time came, her body should be sold. But Sobraji had begun to demand, and Marania to pray for, an answer to the question each had put so many times. It was tiresome, she thought, to be driven to speech when she was not ready for speech. If Sobraji came to-night, she would have to tell him her plan.
He did come. It was dark. He crept among the bushes, and she heard him. Then, stealthily, he emerged from the plantation and touched her on the shoulder. His hand slid down her arm to her hip and lingered there. She bent over to him, and he seized her roughly, brutally, as a faun might seize a virgin, and pulled her body to his.
“Oh!” he half whispered, half groaned, “how I would like to....”
Almost she swooned with ecstasy.
“Come into the plantation!” he urged.
She obeyed, and when they were among the trees, he seized her so savagely that she turned upon him with fear and anger.