He looked back into her eyes. “Glad,” he said. “Ay, but never mind.” He did not want her to talk. And he bent over her and kissed her, and she felt, so he must kiss her forever.

At last she sat up.

“Don’t people often come off together?” she asked with naive curiosity.

“A good many of them never. You can see by the raw look of them.” He spoke unwittingly, regretting he had begun.

“Have you come off like that with other women?”

He looked at her amused.

“I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know.”

And she knew he would never tell her anything he didn’t want to tell her. She watched his face, and the passion for him moved in her bowels. She resisted it as far as she could, for it was the loss of herself to herself.