“Yes, let us!” she said almost pleadingly, and looked innocently at him with great wistful eyes.
She had risen slowly.
“No dreams!” said Niels nervously, putting his arm around her waist. “Too many dreams have passed between you and me. Have you never felt them? Have they never touched you like a light breath caressing your cheek or stirring your hair? Is it possible that the night has never been tremulous with sigh upon sigh that dropped and died on your lips?”
He kissed her, and it seemed to him that she grew less young under his kisses, less young, but lovelier, more glowing in her beauty, more alluring.
“I want you to know it,” he said. “You don’t know how I love you, how I have suffered and longed. Oh, if those rooms at the embankment could speak, Tema!”
He kissed her again and again, and she threw her arms around his neck with such abandon that her wide silk sleeves fell back above the billowing lace of the white undersleeves, above the gray elastic that held them together over the elbow.
“What could those rooms say, Niels?”
“Tema, they could say, ten thousand times and more; they could pray in that name, rage in that name, sigh and sob in it; they could threaten Tema, too.”
“Could they?”
From the street below came a conversation floating in through the open window complete and unabridged, the most commonplace worldly wisdom drawled in shopworn phrases, welded together by two untemperamental, gossipy voices. All this prose made it more wonderful yet to stand there, heart to heart, sheltered in the soft, dim light.