He bent to kiss a cheek like warm and pliant porcelain, and to draw the quilt across a shoulder escaped from its sleeve, and all aglow, as if light itself slumbered there.
He tiptoed from the room and down the stairs and into the August night. He stepped into a cataract of moonbeams streaming down upon the breathing grass and the somnolent trees, the old walls and fences, and the waft flowers in the unkempt garden.
A wind walked to and fro among them like a prisoner in trailing robes, a wind that seemed to be trying to say something, and could not, because its tongue had been plucked out. But it kept trying inarticulately to mumble a warning—against what?—the hazards of life and love perhaps, and the inevitable calamities that follow success.
He had succeeded in winning Patty Jessamine. But what else had he incurred?
CHAPTER III
Leaving the mansion of such a night and entering a mere house, was less a going in than a going out. The night, vast as space, was yet closer than the flesh, more intimate than the marrow of the bones or the retina that sat behind the eyes and observed.
When he left the roomy dark at last he found Patty still asleep, or pretending to be. He could not quite feel sure of her. He never could. It was only of himself and of his idolatry that he was forever sure.
If she slept indeed it would be cruel to wake her. If she affected slumber, it was because she prayed to be spared his love. In either case he had not the courage to invade her retreat, or compel her withdrawn presence to return.
This sublimity of devotion was ridiculous. But he achieved it.
The morning found him still a bachelor. He was amazed at first to hear women’s voices in another room quarreling; it was Patty berating her stupid maid.