'But if you were to meet her again?'
'I should probably suffer a horrible disillusion.'
'But you have found, at any rate, that "first love is best"?'
'First and last. The last shall be first,' he said oracularly.
'Don't you smoke?' she asked.
'Oh, one by one you drag my vices from me. Let me own, en bloc, that I have them all.'
'Then you may light a cigarette and give me one.'
He gave her a cigarette, and held a match while she lit it. Then he lit one for himself. Her manner of smoking was leisurely, luxurious. She inhaled the smoke, and let it escape slowly in a slender spiral. He looked at her through the thin cloud, and his heart closed in a convulsion. 'How big and soft and rich—how magnificent she is—like some great splendid flower, heavy with sweetness!' he thought. He had to breathe deep to overcome a feeling of suffocation; he was trembling in every nerve, and he wondered if she perceived it. He divined the smooth perfection of her body, through the supple cloth that moulded it; he noticed vaguely that the dress she wore to-day was blue, not black. He divined the warmth of her round white throat, the perfume of her skin. 'And how those lips could kiss!' his imagination shouted wildly. Again, the silence, the solitude and dimness of the forest, their intimate seclusion there, the great trees, the sky, the bright green cushion of moss, the few detached sounds,—bird-notes, rustling leaves, snapping twigs,—by which the silence was intensified; again all these lent an acuteness to his sensations. Her dark eyes were smiling lustrously, languidly, at the smoke curling in the air before her, as if they saw a vision in it.
'You're adorable at moments,' he said at last.
'At moments! Thank you.' She laughed.