“David, what is going to become of us? I feel that we must be doing wrong.”
David began to feel how she was indeed asking him a question. She was expecting something of him. He must give her an answer.
He said to himself: “She wants me to propose to her. Oh, I am sorry!” His passion was gone.
He was too kind abruptly to stop his visits. It would have been the kindest thing to do. But David was not egoist enough to know it. He came less often, and left her alone. He tried to talk to her. He realized how little talk there had been in the happy visits: how fully those evenings of delight had been evenings of kisses. The talk wearied him: the “moral tone” was pervasive and obtrusive.
“Give! Give yourself!” her blood cried against her temples.
Had she given, she might have won at least a part of him. David was in no state to resist self-bestowal. Unknown to himself, he was wandering through life, seeking the life that would exchange with his. Nowhere had he found it; without vision of that he would be ever tantalizingly remote from capture.
He was swollen in her senses, now that he held himself stiffly away in his chair and listened to her words. Her power to take-in flooded her body and mellowed it, left dim her eyes whereby to see him. She saw his sweet heaviness beneath the drab of his suit. She had a sense of her fingers running through his hair, of being drunk with him. And it was possible! The room was quiet and suppliant. The lamp was dim for such secrecies. She fought against herself, and passion ran through her, melting her, drenching her, like tears.
But she was a lady. She had not reached thirty years to be seduced by a boy who would not marry....
His visits filtered away: ceased. Again he invited her to an occasional lunch. In his heart, from it all, there remained chiefly self-rebuke. He had not been a gentleman. He had kissed her with casual flippancy: she had not understood. Why, he wondered, was he so superficial in his way with women? Why was their hold on him so slight? This was not love. Tom must be right, and love did not exist. Friendship was the deeper, lovelier passion.... At times, he recalled the little girl in the car or his mother....
An added year upon the emptiness of David.