“Have you turned into Lot’s wife already, or have you the power to turn those big eyes toward the house? It’s pretty from here.”
She startled a little, like the frightened gazelle which was the model of ladylike conduct. Her head came round slowly, and she flicked the dew from her eyes with a quick flutter of the lids. Then the arc of her red lips changed from concave to convex as the sorrowful droop became a warm smile.
A dark thought flitted through his mind that at best she found her future prison less dismal than she had imagined it; and that her fatigue would have made her greet even a jail with relief.
She had sat so long on so rough a voyage that she could hardly rise.
“My limbs have gone to sleep,” she said, and blushed at such a bold allusion. She hardly knew her husband well enough yet for such carelessness.
But he felt a dart of sharp happiness at such an indelicacy. This was a wild adventure. A wilder was to follow, for, as he lifted her across the front wheel he was forced to observe not only her prunella slippers entire, but a flash of the white stocking above the ankle where the crossed thongs were knotted.
He was dizzied by the swoop of her beauty. She came to earth and his arms in the billow of her huge silken skirt, and her vast “elephant” sleeves, with a swirl of ribbons everywhere.
An incense came with the goddess stooping to the ground, and she leaned a moment along his body, the captive of his arms, and he thrust his face so deep into her hat that its brim knocked off his own tall beaver. He let it lie in the dust, though it was a deep-piled St. John of the latest bell.
He kissed her full and fair, and his arms found her as soft, as spicy, and as lithe in her voluminous taffeta as a long bough of tulip blossoms smothered in leaves. But the sharp points of his collar, protruding above his stock like a pair of spear-heads, hurt her cheek and threatened to blind her, and she squealed. He loved to hear her squeal.
A rude guffaw of unmannerly laughter brought him back to daylight and indignation, as he heard old farmer Albeson roar: