“Mildred,” I said in her silence, “you will give your answer. But in your search I can tell you already that you were right; even for my sake, in the light of my own love, you were right to hold me off. You cannot be taken that way. You cannot be stormed. Mating with you must be the peaceful meeting of two equal wills. And it must come to be within a quiet deep and great like itself. There is a passionate stillness more powerful than any tempest. I shall not kiss you again, my love, until you know that kiss for the threshold to our life.”
Her eyes were heavy with thinking. They grew bright.
“Then you agree, even in that, with Philip!”
I nodded. I could not hate him when his name, whoever he was, lived on her lips.
“And now I can tell you why I pushed you off.”
“Why, Mildred?”
She moved her head slowly from side to side; she sat down; she smoothed her gown downward from her neck.
“I have learned something ... here.” Her hands with a sharp candor, while her eyes met mine, followed the gauze I had ruffled, and cupped her breasts. “I care for you, and I care for Philip. I thought that was enough: that I could blindly let time order ... time and mood ... what each of you wanted of me, and what I wanted to give. It is not so. Time counts terribly! Before I can give myself to either of you, I must know which of you I want to take me first. And then I feel ... I feel, when I have learned who is first, there may be no second!”
“Mildred, you see that I was right? You have learned what I knew when I first saw you. Before I saw you I held myself for you. I denied myself. Not only did I know there could be no one beyond you ... none even before you!”
She was murmuring almost to herself: “It was your mouth on my breast. Your hot mouth marking my flesh, that made me know....”