Then Lorraine got up.
“You are grave, mon ami; and it is the springtime. Grave thoughts are for the autumn of life—recklessness better becomes the joyful spring.”
“Are you ever reckless nowadays?” he asked, watching her graceful movements as she bent down and buried her face in a cushion of violets.
“I am when I smell violets. They may be modest and retiring little flowers, but they hold spring rapture and spring lavishness and spring desiring in their scent all the same.”
“Then you are reckless now?”
What was it made him dally thus upon dangerous ground? What was it made him speak to Lorraine as he had never spoken before, on the very day after his mother’s admonition? Why did his immense height and strength and the young vigour in his blood suddenly blot out the years that lay between them, and sweep into his soul, the knowledge of his masculinity and might, which of its own nature possessively dominated her femininity?
They seemed all at once to have strayed into an atmosphere, born of that warning admonition, and of their talk, of the reckless, creative spring; and because, in spite of his youth, he was very much a man, and she was a dangerously attractive woman, his pulses leapt fitfully and eagerly with the swift ache that has existed ever since God made man and woman.
Without looking up, Lorraine felt this. The very air about them seemed charged with it, and she too, under some spell of springtime, moved into closer proximity to the splendid knight. She brushed against his arm unconsciously; and looking down on the top of her dark head, he said half-shyly:
“You somehow seem such a little thing today, Lorraine, I feel as if I could pick you up, as one does a small child.”
“Please don’t,” with a low laugh—“just think of my dignity.”