Geoffrey had never gazed on a naked woman except idealised in marble or on canvas. The secret of Venus had been for him, as for many men, an inviolate Mecca towards which he worshipped. Glimpses he had seen, visions of soft curves, mica glistenings of creamy skin, but never the crude anatomical fact.
An overgrown embryo she seemed, a gawkish ill-moulded thing.
Woman, thought Geoffrey, should be supple and pliant, with a suggestion of swiftness galvanising the delicacy of the lines. Atalanta was his ideal woman.
But this creature had apparently no bones or sinews. She looked like a sawdust dummy. She seemed to have been poured into a bag of brown tissue. There was no waist line. The chest appeared to fit down upon the thighs like a lid. The legs hung from the hips like trouser-legs, and seemed to fit into the feet like poles into their sockets. The turned-in toes were ridiculous and exasperating. There was no shaping of breasts, stomach, knees and ankles. There was nothing in this image of clay to show the loving caress of the Creator's hand. It had been modelled by a wretched bungler in a moment of inattention.
Yet it stood there, erect and challenging, this miserable human tadpole, usurping the throne of Lais and crowned with the worship of such devotees as Patterson and Wigram.
Are all women ugly? The query flashed through Geoffrey's brain. Is the vision of Aphrodite Anadyomene an artist's lie? Then he thought of Asako. Stripped of her gauzy nightdresses, was she like this? A shame on such imagining!
Patterson was hugging a girl on his knee. Wigram had caught hold of another. Geoffrey said—but nobody heard him,—
"It's getting too hot for me here. I'm going."
So he went.
His little wife was awake, and disposed to be tearful.