The next moment, though with protests, she was leaning farther back in the shadow.
Then, close and in murmurs, we began to talk.
I am not going to claim for Evie that she ever had any very remarkable gift of tongues. I don't mean that on occasion she couldn't talk for half a day on end; but I do mean that beyond a certain point she displayed a diffidence, talk became something of an adventure to her, and she had a way of advancing upon a silence as if it was a fortified place, to be carried by assault, and not to be won by beleaguering. Therefore, seeing her now sensible of a new liberation and joy, I was not unprepared for little excesses, things said out of mere fulness, and perhaps even to be slightly regretted on the morrow.
Yet I didn't want fulness on the subjects of which she now began to ease her breast. I didn't want to hear of the events of the day before, nor of the people who had been there, nor of whether these people had or had not "thought it odd" that she should have become re-engaged. I didn't want to hear about the late Mrs Merridew's lingering and comatose illness. And when, in a burst of almost passionate candour, she spoke of the relief it was to be able at last to unburden herself thus, I would gladly have stopped her had I known how. But I lacked the courage to tell her, when she asked me whether I did not think it a good idea that she should keep nothing secret from me, that I thought it the worst of ideas.
"You see, Jeff," she murmured, out of a beautiful sense of rest and surrender, "I do so want ours to be a friendship as well as a marriage!"
Already the nearness and warmth of her had set me trembling. I don't know that I wanted more "friendship" than needs be; I wanted something, oh, far deeper and rarer. I wanted that full treasury of her warm blood and odorous hair and large and mobile eyes. Friendship? I laughed softly, and gathered these beauties closer.... Understand, I don't for a moment mean that she was unaware of these possessions of hers; I call that oval mirror that later we set up in our bedroom to witness that; but she merely wanted something else, being human, and wanted it the more, being feminine. And as she told me now what she wanted our marriage to be, she put me away a little, with her hands on my breast.
"Don't you, too, darling?" she appealed, with a look that put "friendship" quite out of existence....
"Don't I what, rogue?"
"Want it to be like that."
"No," I bantered, adoring her....