Still, Sheila was glad to keep Jim interested in respectable conversation, for Dorothy’s sake. Sometimes when Bret had to go back to his office, after dinner, and Jim was free, he just dropped round just the same.
On these occasions he seemed to be laboring under some excitement, full of audacious impulses restrained by timidity. Sheila felt a nausea at her suspicions; she was ashamed of them.
One cruelly hot evening when Bret was at the factory and the only stir of air eddied in a vine-covered corner of the big piazza she heard Jim come up the walk. She did not speak, hoping that he would go away. But he called her twice, and she had to answer.
He invited himself to sit down, and after violently casual chatter began to talk of his loneliness and her kindliness. She was his one salvation, he said.
In the dusk he was only a voice, a voice of longing and appeal, like a disembodied Satan in a mood of desire. In the gloom she felt his hand brush hers, then cling. She drew hers away. His followed. It was very strange that two beings should conflict so tangibly, audibly, without any other evidence of existence.
Suddenly she knew that he was standing close to her, bending over her. She pushed her chair back and rose. Unseen arms caught her to a ghost as invisible and ineluctable as the wrestler with Jacob.
Sheila was horrified. She blamed herself more than Jim. She hated herself and humanity. “Don’t! please!” she pleaded in a whisper. She dreaded to have the servants overhear such an encounter. Jim misinterpreted her motive, clenched her tighter, and tried to find her lips with his.
“I thought you were Bret’s friend,” she protested as she hid her face from him.
“I like Bret,” Jim whispered in a frenzy, “but I love you. And I want you to love me. You do! You must! Kiss me!”
She tried to release the proved weapon of her elbow, but he held her by the wrists till she wrenched her hand loose with great pain and gave him her knuckles for a kiss.