“She has much more reason to envy you,” said Burlap, looking deep, subtle, and Christian once more, and wagging his head.
“Envy me for being unhappy?”
“Who’s unhappy?” asked Lady Edward, breaking in on them at this moment. “Good evening, Mr. Burlap,” she went on without waiting for an answer. Burlap told her how much he had enjoyed the music.
“We were just talking about Lucy,” said Molly d’Exergillod, interrupting him. “Agreeing that she was like a fairy. So light and detached.”
“Fairy!” repeated Lady Edward, emphatically rolling the “r” far back in her throat. “She’s like a leprechaun. You’ve no idea, Mr. Burlap, how hard it is to bring up a leprechaun.” Lady Edward shook her head. “She used really to frighten me sometimes.”
“Did she?” said Molly. “But I should have thought you were a bit of a fairy yourself, Lady Edward.”
“A bit,” Lady Edward admitted. “But never to the point of being a leprechaun.”
“Well?” said Lucy, as Walter sat down beside her in the cab. She seemed to be uttering a kind of challenge. “Well?”
The cab started. He lifted her hand and kissed it. It was his answer to her challenge. “I love you. That’s all.”
“Do you, Walter?” She turned toward him and, taking his face between her two hands, looked at him intently in the half darkness. “Do you?” she repeated; and as she spoke, she shook her head slowly and smiled. Then, leaning forward, she kissed him on the mouth. Walter put his arms round her; but she disengaged herself from the embrace. “No, no,” she protested and dropped back into her corner. “No.”
He obeyed her and drew away. There was a silence. Her perfume was of gardenias; sweet and tropical, the perfumed symbol of her being enveloped him. “I ought to have insisted,” he was thinking. “Brutally. Kissed her again and again. Compelled her to love me. Why didn’t I? Why?” He didn’t know, or why she had kissed him, unless it was just provocatively, to make him desire her more violently, to make him more hopelessly her slave. Nor why, knowing this, he still loved her. Why, why? he kept repeating to himself. And echoing his thoughts out loud, her voice suddenly spoke.
“Why do you love me?” she asked from her corner.
He opened his eyes. They were passing a street lamp. Through the window of the moving cab the light of it fell on her face. It stood out for a moment palely against the darkness, then dropped back into invisibility—a pale mask that had seen everything before and whose expression was one of amused detachment and a hard, rather weary languor. “I was just wondering,” Walter answered. “And wishing I didn’t.”
“I might say the same, you know. You’re not particularly amusing when you’re like this.”
How tiresome, she reflected, those men who imagined that nobody had ever been in love before! All the same, she liked him. He was attractive. No, “attractive” wasn’t the word. Attractive, as a possible lover, was just what he wasn’t. “Appealing” was more like it. An appealing lover? It wasn’t exactly her style. But she liked him. There was something very nice about him. Besides, he was clever, he could be a pleasant companion. And tiresome as it was, his lovesickness did at least make him very faithful. That, for Lucy, was important. She was afraid of loneliness and needed her cavalier servants in constant attendance. Walter attended with a doglike fidelity. But why did he look so like a whipped dog sometimes? So abject. What a fool! She felt suddenly annoyed by his abjection.
“Well, Walter,” she said mockingly, laying her hand on his, “why don’t you talk to me?”
He did not reply.
“Or is mum the word?” Her fingers brushed electrically along the back of his hand and closed round his wrist. “Where’s your pulse?” she asked after a moment. “I can’t feel it anywhere.” She groped over the soft skin for the throbbing of the artery. He felt the touch of her finger tips, light and thrilling and rather cold against his wrist. “I don’t believe you’ve got a pulse,” she said. “I believe your blood stagnates.” The tone of her voice was contemptuous. What a fool! she was thinking. What an abject fool! “Just stagnates,” she repeated, and suddenly, with sudden malice, she drove her sharp, file-pointed nails into his flesh. Walter cried out in surprise and pain. “You deserved it,” she said, and laughed in his face.
He seized her by the shoulders and began to kiss her, savagely. Anger had quickened his desire; his kisses were a vengeance. Lucy shut her eyes and abandoned herself unresistingly, limply. Little premonitions of pleasure shot with a kind of panic flutter, like fluttering moths, through her skin. And suddenly sharp fingers seemed to pluck, pizzicato, at the fiddle strings of her nerves; Walter could feel her whole body starting involuntarily within his arms, starting as though it had been suddenly hurt. Kissing her, he found himself wondering if she had expected him to react in this way to her provocation, if she had hoped he would. He took her slender neck in his two hands. His thumbs were on her windpipe. He pressed gently. “One day,” he said between his clenched teeth, “I shall strangle you.”
Lucy only laughed. He bent forward and kissed her laughing mouth. The touch of his lips against her own sent a thin, sharp sensation that was almost pain running unbearably through her. The panic moth wings fluttered over her body. She
