"I again wavered—allusions to these eventful occasions seemed to portend grief to her and pain incidentally to me.
"I caught her wrist as it turned the handle of the wardrobe door, and remonstrated. 'I refuse to see them; I know nothing of clothes and I'm not a detective, I won't pry into your past secrets, either of sorrow or of joy.'
"Her hand shook in my clasp.
"'Don't stop me,' she cried, imperatively. 'Help me—I want you to know them.'
"'So be it,' I said, and pushed back the door. Then she suddenly flung herself in front of it, between me and the row of dainty frocks and shimmering laces. She looked like Cassandra—in a soft, yellowy flannel gown with loose sleeves falling away from her pink arms that blushed with the heaving blood in her warm breasts—like Cassandra guarding the gate of a citadel, though her lips said in a tone richer than wine, sweeter than music, 'Kiss me first.'"
There was a long pause—Yeldham sat blankly staring at the coals, and I gazed intently into the mists of nicotine that curled upwards to the ceiling. Through them I could conjure a vision of her bronzed coronal and Aubrey's massive muscularity, and could picture her glowing arms around his neck—a convolvulus entwining a Gothic column.
"There are some kisses," he said presently, "that are worth the whole sum of human pleasure. Pleasure! Faugh!—a rotten word—belonging to those who only half live!"
He handled a cigarette mechanically and lit it.
"Well," he continued, "the first dress was white. A virginal thing of simple gauze and flummery, with a frontage of puffings to make up for bust development. Quite a girl's dress. Women, you know, are less generous in the matter of—chiffon, don't they call it?—and more so in the matter of flesh. It was her debût dress—I supposed—but she contradicted.
"'No,' she explained, 'not quite that. One's debût is a hazy affair: all excitement, wonder, blush, and clumsiness, with little or no enjoyment. Yet how many of us would give the long, grey end of life for that first night's dappling of peach bloom? It was the frock I wore on the evening I first met my husband.'