Meta Beggs wore a shirtwaist perforated like a sieve; through it he saw flimsy lace, a faded blue ribband, her gleaming shoulders. In an obscure turn of the path she stopped and faced him. “Just look,” she proclaimed, unfastening a bone button that held her cuff. She rolled her sleeve back over her arm. High up, near the soft under-turning, were visible the bluish prints of fingers. “You see,” she added; “and there are others ... where I can’t show you.”
“Buck’s pretty vigorous with the girls,” he admitted; “I once dropped him down a spell for it.”
He was fascinated by her naked, shapely arm; it was slender at the wrist, and surprisingly round above, at a soft, brown shadow. He was seized by a desire to touch it, and he held her pointed elbow while he examined the bruises more minutely. “That’s bad,” he pronounced; “on that pretty skin, too.” He was confused by the close proximity of her bare flesh, the pulse in his neck beat visibly.
For a moment she stood motionless; then, with her eyes half closed, sulky, she drew away from him and rearranged her sleeve.
The brush ended on a slope where pine trees had covered the ground with a glossy mat of bronzed needles; and his companion sank to a sitting position with her back against a trunk. They were outside the influence of the camp meeting, beyond its unnatural excitation. The pine trees were black against the brilliant day; they might have been cast in iron, there was no suggestion of growth in the dun covering below; it was as seasonless where they sat as the sea; the air, faintly spiced and still, seemed to have lain unchanged through countless ages.
Meta Beggs sat motionless, with a look of inexpressible boredom on her pale countenance. Her hands, Gordon thought, were like folded buds of the mountain magnolia.
She said, unexpectedly, “You’re rich now, aren’t you, one of the richest men in the county?”
“Why I—I got some money; that is, my wife has.”
She dismissed, with an impatient gesture, the distinction. “Money is life,” she continued, with a perceptible, envious longing, “it’s freedom, all the things worth having. It makes women—it’s their leather boxes full of rings and pins and necklaces, their dresses of all-over lace, their silk and hand scalloped and embroidered underclothes; it’s their fascination and chance and power—”
“I would like to see you in some of those lace things,” he returned.