As soon as they found themselves alone together she would kiss him with the awkward prettiness of a great tomboy, pouting of the lips that were grotesque, and bounds that made her too full bosom shake beneath her bodice. He was above all, sickened with hearing her say, “My pet,” “My doggie,” “My jewel,” “My birdie,” “My treasure,” “My own,” “My precious,” and to see her offer herself to him every time with a little comedy of infantile modesty, little movements of alarm that she thought pretty, and the tricks of a depraved schoolgirl. She would ask, “Whose mouth is this?” and when he did not reply “Mine,” would persist till she made him grow pale with nervous irritability. She ought to have felt, it seemed to him, that in love extreme tact, skill, prudence, and exactness are requisite; that having given herself to him, she, a woman of mature years, the mother of a family, and holding a position in society, should yield herself gravely, with a kind of restrained eagerness, with tears, perhaps, but with those of Dido, not of Juliet.

She kept incessantly repeating to him, “How I love you, my little pet. Do you love me as well, baby?”

He could no longer bear to be called “my little pet,” or “baby,” without an inclination to call her “old girl.”

She would say to him, “What madness of me to yield to you. But I do not regret it. It is so sweet to love.”

All this seemed to George irritating from her mouth. She murmured, “It is so sweet to love,” like the village maiden at a theater.

Then she exasperated him by the clumsiness of her caresses. Having become all at once sensual beneath the kisses of this young fellow who had so warmed her blood, she showed an unskilled ardor and a serious application that made Du Roy laugh and think of old men trying to learn to read. When she would have gripped him in her embrace, ardently gazing at him with the deep and terrible glance of certain aging