“And what’s more,” she added, “we won’t be meeting again for some time. Maybe we will never meet again, Ivor! For I’m sure you won’t take any steps about it—just like all these years you have known me and never tried to see me, never once!”
“You are very exclusive, I do think,” she said wistfully.
There she stood, a head below him, white face up at him, eyes wide and very grave, amazing and somehow unearthly! and the breasts under that tight red bodice, little full breasts. And suddenly his one arm took Virginia bodily, and pressed her to him and her face up to him. He kissed her lips: and her little tight breasts were hot against him. For a long time, a long time utterly lost to time in the violent softness of Virginia’s lips, his arm pressing her to him. So thin she was, tall and thin and breakable. And she shivered a little, her eyes tight closed, and her face a white mask: startling white between those twin gold curls, gay “Swan and Edgar!” She swayed a little, and her skirt rustled, and when his arm loosed her she seemed to fall right down into the wide chair behind her. Helpless white mask, carnival dead of carnival! She opened her eyes and stared up at him, the man darkly up there. But a crypt was not darker than Virginia’s blue eyes....
“I didn’t mean you to do that,” she whispered.
He fumbled.
“I’m sorry ...” he fumbled. It killed all assurance, that look of hers. He took a cigarette from the box on the table.
“I didn’t mean to, either,” he said coldly. Then why had he done it? He loathed fumbling. And suddenly he got furious. What was all this about, anyway?... “You shouldn’t have come here,” he said bitterly.
And somehow, as she lay there like a broken Venetian toy, his eyes fixed on her mouth. He had never seen it before, Virginia’s mouth, but now his eyes desperately found it. A queer mouth it was somehow, queer lips for a lovely woman to have: there was nothing soft, nothing yielding about them: beautiful but somehow unwomanly lips, so taut, so dry: the lips of a woman who liked the wind in her face.... He had never seen Virginia’s mouth before. And now the touch of it was on his own, hot and dry. Nothing moist about Virginia. He smiled at her helplessly....
“I didn’t come here for you to do that—I didn’t, Ivor!” she cried up at him, and her eyes glittered with tears—Virginia in tears!
He wanted to laugh and brush it aside. As though Virginia had never been kissed before—Virginia! “Forget it,” he wanted to say coarsely. She was too serious.... But, somehow, he was serious, too. He stood above her in her chair, a long way above her. He murmured something....