d
THAT moment with the butler in the hall was like a strip of arid land parting two seas of my mind. As I went up the stairs, all that had lived in me, walking through the city, went ... went out, and I lived whole in the imminent presence of Mildred. If I had asked myself what I had thought, what I had seen, out there, I could have answered only: Mildred. But even to have asked the question would have been impossible to me, since every question and every answer now was Mildred.
She opened, closed the door. Mildred is in the room, with her hand still on the doorknob and her eyes smiling upon me. Mildred I know and following my eyes I find at last myself, and still find only Mildred.
Let her stay there smiling, her slight shoulders faintly straining back with her arms, and the bare throat pulsant. Let her stay there holding me in her smile. For when she moves, what will become of me? Her chin is up: her face is inclined forward so that her violet eyes lie under the half-shut lids and peer at me. Her chin is a rounded, exquisite apex, and the cheeks trace triangularly subtle to the brow that is her chiefest glory. Mildred’s hair is gold, and is banded high, freeing all her forehead.
Let her stay there smiling, holding me in her smile. With her arms’ strain as they clasp the knob behind them, the shoulders are sheer in the orange gauze of the gown: and the little breasts are high and firm ... very high, and strangely one with the throb of her throat!
Mildred comes forward and gives me both her hands. Her arms are thin, they have no molded beauty. They are like all her body: no sculptured mass of flesh but a mysterious stream of life swift-running, like white fire ever within itself, yet fixed upon some pattern immobile and essenced.
“Well,” comes her laughing voice. “You’re early. And you’re out of breath. If you were late that’d be more excusable. Sit down.”
I sit down, and I stand again.
“Mildred, I’m sorry I am out of breath. But I have breath enough to say what must come first of all this evening ... first of all, all my life. Mildred, I love you.”
Her eyes deepen and grow soft. Her delicate face is a hard fragility about the brooding thought of her eyes. She sits down.