She sat on his thighs, her head against his breast, and her ivory-gleaming legs loosely apart, the fire glowing unequally upon them. Sitting with his head dropped, he looked at the folds of her body in the fireglow, and at the fleece of soft brown hair that hung down to a point between her open thighs. He reached to the table behind, and took up her bunch of flowers, still so wet that drops of rain fell on to her.

“Flowers stops out of doors all weathers,” he said. “They have no houses.”

“Not even a hut!” she murmured.

With quiet fingers he threaded a few forget-me-not flowers in the fine brown fleece of the mount of Venus.

“There!” he said. “There’s forget-me-nots in the right place!”

She looked down at the milky odd little flowers among the brown maidenhair at the lower tip of her body.

“Doesn’t it look pretty!” she said.