He rallied. "Then what are you waiting for?"
"I was waiting for you," she said, "to tell you that it's no good."
He had moved a little way out of the stream of people, so that he was now placed with his back against the shutter, and she with her shoulder to the stream. As she stood thus a man jostled her, more to attract her attention than to move her from his path. She gave a little gasp and shrank back with a movement that brought her nearer to Ransome and to his side. And as she moved there came from her, from her clothes, and from her hair, a faint odor of violets, familiar yet wonderful.
"You don't mind my speaking to you?" she said.
"No," said he, "but let's get out of this first."
He put his hand lightly on her arm to steer her through the stream. There was something about her—it may have been in her voice, or in the way she looked at him—something helpless that implored and entreated and appealed to his young manhood for protection. Her arm yielded to his touch, yet with a slight pressure that made him aware that its tissue was of an incredible softness. Somehow, for the moment while this touch and pressure lasted, he found it impossible to look at her. Some instinct held his eyes from her, as if he had been afraid.
They moved on slowly, aimlessly it seemed to Ransome; yet steering he was steered, northward, up the side street where he had seen her disappear with Winny. It was quiet there. He no longer touched her. He could look at her now.
He looked. And what he saw was a girl well grown and of incomparable softness. She could not have been much more than twenty, but her body was already rounded to the full flower of its youth. This body was neither tall nor slender nor particularly graceful. Yet it carried itself with an effect of tallness and slenderness and grace.
In the same way she impressed him as being well dressed. Yet she only wore a little plain black gown cut rather low, with a broad lace collar. There was a black velvet band round her waist and another on her wide black hat. And yet another and a narrower band of black velvet round her full white neck.
The face above that neck was not beautiful, for her little straight nose was a shade too blunt, her upper lip a shade too long and too flat; her large mouth, red and sullen-sweet, a shade too unfinished at the edges. There was, moreover, a hint of fullness about the jaw and chin. But the color and the texture of this face made almost imperceptible its flaws of structure. It was as if it had erred only through an excess of softness that made the flesh of it plastic to its blood, to the subtle flame that transfused the white of it, flushing and burning to rose-red. A flame that even in soaring knew its place; for it sank before it could diminish the amazing blueness of her eyes; and it had left her forehead and her eyelids to the whiteness that gave accent to eyebrows and eyelashes black as her black hair.