It was as if she had known that he would come to her. They shook hands awkwardly. And with the stirring of her body there came from her that faint warm odor of violets.
"I didn't expect to see you here," he said, at last.
"Winny brought me; else I shouldn't have come."
She was very precise in making Winny responsible for her appearance. He gathered that that was her idea of propriety.
"Well—anyhow—it's a bit of all right," he said. Then they sat silent for a while.
And the girl's face turned to Ranny with a flying look; and it was as if she had touched him with her eyes, lightly and shyly, and was gone. Then her eyes began slowly to look him up and down, up and down, from his bare neck and arms, white against the thin crimson binding of his "zephyr," from his shoulders and from his chest where the lines and bosses of the muscles showed under the light gauze, and from his crimson belt, down the firm long slopes to his knees; and it was as if her eyes brushed him, palpably, with soft feather strokes. They rested on his face; and it was as if they held him between two ardent hands. And over her own face as she looked at him there went a little wave of change. Her rich color stirred and deepened; her lips parted for the quick passage of her breath; and her blue eyes looked gray as if veiled in a light vapor.
Ranny was seized with an overpowering, a terrible consciousness of himself and of his evolutions on the horizontal bar.
"Well," he said, as if in apology, "you've seen me figuring queerly."
"Oh, it's all right for men," she said. "Besides, I've seen you before."
"Why, you weren't here last time?"