The feminine speeches, the appeal of these eyes, seemed all at once to create an enveloping pressure, softer than nothing, yet extraordinary. Or possibly the trouble was that Dionysius, after all, had freed his eyes of the magic more brilliantly than his creator.
"What sort of girls do you like? Tell me?" said the voice of Woman, nearer.
And then in the suddenest way conceivable there took place the Strange Occurrence referred to. Without the smallest premeditation, Charles bent and touched his lips to that smooth invitational cheek.
On that central point there is not the slightest room for doubt. Let there be no wriggling or evasion here. Charles Garrott, who scorned La Femme and viewed Woman exclusively as a Movement, did bend his neck and kiss the Mitchellton Home-Maker upon a sofa.
He meant the salute, he was afterward certain, as but a fatherly tribute to youth and beauty, or (considered in another way) but the expected, and in a sense purely conventional, move in the ancient parlor-game. But on such a move as this homes have been broken, families set to mutual slaughter, thrones shaken, history changed. Charles, to put it in a word, found it easier to begin paying his tributes than gracefully to desist from them.
Prompted by a not unnatural curiosity, the lady (who had not proved more than maidenly surprised or rebuking) said:—
"Oh!... Why do you do this?"
