it.
He wished he had kept the cigar, as a proof of his manhood. He wished that he had worn a fresh shirt, he wished, but then there was no further time for wishing.
Lil stepped out from behind the screen. She was barefooted, and her toes were chubby and rosy pink like those of a little girl.
'I have seen you on the street, mister Ballantyne,' Lil told him quietly. And I have admired your manly disposition. I am so glad we have had an opportunity to meet.'
The words worked a miracle. Ralph felt himself growing in stature, the trembling in his legs stilled and they felt strong and sure under him.
'Do you like my robe?' Lil asked, and took the long skirts in her hands, turning to make them flare.
Ralph nodded dumbly, his new-found strength had not yet reached his tongue, but his eyes were wide and feverish.
She came to him and without her heels she stood only as high as his shoulder. 'Let me help you with your coat.'
And when he was in his shirtsleeves, she said, 'Come and sit on the sofa.' She took his hand and led him across the room.
'Do you like me, mister Ballantyne?'
At last he could speak, 'Oh yes. Oh yes!'
'May I call you Ralph? I feel I know you so well.'
Very early one January morning long ago she had left the Mayfair house, and reached the deserted park where it had snowed during the night. The snow lay white and smooth and unmarked. She left the gravelled path, and the snow crumbled like sugar under her feet. When she looked back her tiny footprints were strung out across the unblemished snow, as though she were the first and only woman in the world. It gave her an extraordinary feeling of her own importance. Now as she lay on the wide bedstead beside the lad, she experienced that same feeling.
He was not a lad, but she thought of him as that. His body was fully matured, but his innocence made him as vulnerable as an unweaned infant, and his body was like the snow which no other feet had trodden.
The sun had stained his throat in a deep V down onto his chest, but the skin of his chest and flat belly were the lustrous white of watered marble or of freshly fallen snow. She touched it with her lips and when his little dusty rose nipples puckered and started her own skin crawling deliciously, she took his hands. His palms were rough and callused from work on the stagings and in the pit. The fingernails were torn and cracked, with ingrained dirt beneath them. But it was honest dirt, and the hands were shapely, long and graceful. She had learned to judge men by the shape of their hands, and now she lifted Ralph's to her lips and kissed them lightly, watching his eyes as she did so.
Then slowly she took his hands down and cupped them over her own soft breasts. She felt the rough skin rasp her own nipples, and they popped out like full moons, pale pink and tense.
'You like that, Ralph?' She asked that same question five times, and the last time was when the room was almost dark and he was convulsed and shaking within the circle of her arms and her pliant thighs, drenched with his own sweet young sweat, and breathing in little choking sobs.
'You like that, Ralph?' And his reply was broken and ragged: 'Oh yes. Oh yes, Miss. Suddenly she was sad. The snow was trodden, the magic was passing, just as the power she had wielded was transitory.
She had not cried in ten long hard years, not since that first evening in the Mayfair house, but now she was shocked to find the constriction in her throat and the burning behind her eyes.
'What is there to cry for?' she wondered desolately.
'It's far too late for tears.'
She rolled Ralph expertly onto his back, his body limp and unresisting, and for a moment she stared at him hatefully. He had touched something in her which had hurt unbearably. Then the hating passed and there was only the sadness.
She kissed him once more, softly and regretfully.
'You must go now, Ralph,' she said.
He lingered at the door, with his jacket over his arm and his cap in his hand.
'I will come and see you again, Lilly.'
She formed a bow with her lips and painted them with quick deft strokes before she replied, but while she worked she was watching him in the mirror.
He was altered already, she saw. He stood four-square, his shoulders wide and his neat young head proud on the column of his sun-tanned neck. The sweet diffidence was gone, the appealing shyness evaporated. An hour before he would have said: 'Please can I come and see you again, Miss Lill?'
She smiled at him in the mirror, that bright burnished smile, and the diamond in her tooth winked sardonically.
'You come any time, dearie, any time you have saved ten guineas.'
It was only surprising that the full report of Ralph's foray into the lilac fields of Venus took so long to reach Zouga, for Barry Lennox had repeated the story with zest and embroidery to anyone who would listen, and the chaff and banter had flown like a Kalahari dust-storm every evening in Diamond Lil's canteen.
'Gentlemen, you are speaking about the eldest son of one of the pillars of Kimberley Society,' Lil admonished them saucily. 'Remember that Major Ballantyne is not only a member of the Kimberley Club, but a respected ornament of the Diggers' Committee.' She knew that one of them would soon succumb to the temptation to take the story to Zouga Ballantyne. 'I would love to hear what that cold-bellied, stuck-up prig will say when he hears,' she told herself secretly. 'Even the iced water in his veins will boil.'
