“I have respect for you,” he said. He took her in his arms and kissed her....
He said: “We are strangers ... we are strangers who respect each other.”
“Help me,” he said.
“Help you?”
“Help me to bring you to yourself. You are stunned. Ill things come over you and you are stunned, you cannot make yourself clean.... I want you naked. Help me. Naked against me naked. You will be at last yourself ... inviolate. Help me!”
He undressed her. She helped him to undress her. She lay in his arms: lost sweetly like a tree in a warm wind.
“You make me feel that I have roots,” she told him.
She found that she had been buried in a corrodent silence. She was lifted forth. She had words.