“No, it’s nothing about ‘Barrage.’”
“Then what ... but I’m worrying you, poor dear. I’ll give you some tea and you can tell me then.”
And, the water boiling, he made the tea and carried Amory a cup where she lay. He packed a cushion in the small of her back and made her put her feet up; then, sitting down on a little square hassock by her side, he patted her hand.
“No, don’t talk just yet,” he murmured. “Will you have a phenacetin? Well, perhaps the tea will set you right. Close your eyes and I’ll try to take it away.”
And, rising from the hassock, he drew a chair to the sofa-end, sat behind Amory, and began gently to draw his fingers over her closed lids and back towards the roots of her hair,—“Don’t talk—give yourself quite up to it,” he murmured....
Amory, relaxing totally, did so.
Sympathetic in all things as Cosimo was, in nothing was he so sympathetic as in his touch of an aching head. Softly as a woman, he changed from stroking Amory’s lids, and began lightly to draw his sensitive tips along the angle of her jaw and up the sides of her bluebell-stalk of a neck. And he knew when she felt better, for he whispered “Sssh—I can feel it passing into my fingers and wrists—keep your eyes closed——” and continued to stroke. Amory could not have borne to let anybody else touch her so; it was only because of their intellectual affinity that she could bear Cosimo’s long fingers upon her lids and cheek and neck. Mr. Hamilton Dix she must certainly have struck; and as she lay back, with Cosimo’s silky tips passing over her face, she remembered, apropos of nothing, the only other male contact she had ever experienced—a brutal kiss, snatched years ago under the dark portico of the McGrath, with a knocking together of crania, and a smell of tobacco, and a horrible stiff little moustache.... She could not have endured even Cosimo with a moustache....
And Dorothy talked about the world and its “conclusions!”
By and by her fingers softly touched Cosimo’s, in token that she felt better. Slowly she opened her eyes again.
“Ah!” she said.... “Thanks, dear. I don’t know why I should come all over like that.”