But the inevitable reaction came. Revulsion might be the more accurate word applied to Cecille. That night she had stripped off one stocking in preparation for bed; she had sat longer than she could have told, broodingly studying her bare knee.
"No smoother than he," she murmured at last.
The sound of her own voice smote her, the thing that she had said.
As her head flung up she encountered in a mirror her own reflection. She stared, transfixed, at her image; her moist, curling mouth, her dusky cheeks and eyelids drooping down. Then she closed her eyelids tight to shut it out. She groped and found the light and snapped it off. And she lay hours upon her face, her hair fanwise on her pillow, sick and debased.
She laid it to the pitch that she had touched. You had to be defiled. But she didn't blame Felicity. She wasn't that kind of a coward. It must be the slow poison of her frank creed. She'd fight it. Game? She'd be game. But this time she refused to wonder why she didn't pack her bag and get out. She couldn't. She knew she couldn't go. She wondered why she couldn't cry.
Thus she found a private little hell in what should have been pure glory.
But she fought. After she had admitted to herself that she loved him, she crouched from it like something in a corner. Love? That wasn't love! And yet Felicity in all her passionless calculation had never once—
It baffled her, bowed her down. It was too snarled now. She'd never make it out. But she wouldn't go again to the gymnasium. No! But what of that? She had only to close her eyes to see. She fought it.
It was a very hot though private little hell.