“I might, with assistance.”
“If you once saw the world! I’ve been reading about Paris, the avenues and cafés and theaters. Why, in the cafés there they drink only champagne and dance all night. The women come with their lovers in little closed carriages, and go back to little closed rooms hung in brocade. They never wear anything but evening clothes, for they are never out but at night—satin gowns with trains and bare shoulders.”
He endeavored to picture himself in such a city, amid such a life, with Meta Beggs. He felt that she would be entirely in place in the little carriages, drinking champagne. “That’s where they eat frogs,” he remarked inanely. In the tensity of her feeling, the bitterness of her longing, her envy, she cursed him for a dull fool. Then, recovering her composure with a struggle:
“I would make a man drunk with pleasure in a place like that. He would be proud of me, and all the other men would hate him; they would all want me.”
“Some would come pretty near getting you, too,” he replied with a flash of penetration; “those with the fastest horses or longest pockets.”
“I would be true to whoever took me there,” she declared; “out of gratitude.”
He drew a deep breath. “What would you say,” he inquired, leaning toward her, “to a trip to—to Richmond? We could be gone the best part of a week.”
She laughed scornfully. “Do you think I am as cheap as that—to be bought over Sunday?” She rose, and stood before him, sharply outlined against the foliage, the water, the momentary, flittering insects, taunting, provocative, sensual.
“Five years ago,” he told her, “if you had tried this foolery, I would have choked you, and thrown what was left in the dam.”
“And now—” she jeered fearlessly.