“No, no. I see Hermine gave you the key. Isn’t that it?”
“Oh, it does make you angry. I’ll go again.”
“No, lovely Maria, stay! Only, just tonight, I’m very sad. I can’t be jolly tonight. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll be better again.”
I was bending over her and she took my head in her large firm hands and drawing it down gave me a long kiss. Then I sat down on the bed beside her and took her hands and asked her to speak low in case we were heard, and looked at her beautiful full rounded face that lay so strangely and wonderfully on my pillow like a large flower. She drew my hand slowly to her lips and laid it beneath the clothes on her warm and evenly breathing breast.
“You don’t need to be jolly,” she said. “Hermine told me that you had troubles. Anyone can understand that. Tell me, then, do I please you still? The other day, when we were dancing, you were very much in love with me.”
I kissed her eyes, her mouth and neck and breasts. A moment ago I had thought of Hermine with bitterness and reproach. Now I held her gift in my hands and was thankful. Maria’s caresses did not harm the wonderful music I had heard that evening. They were its worthy fulfilment. Slowly I drew the clothes from her lovely body till my kisses reached her feet. When I lay down beside her, her flower-face smiled back at me omniscient and bountiful.
During this night by Maria’s side I did not sleep much, but my sleep was as deep and peaceful as a child’s. And between sleeping I drank of her beautiful warm youth and heard, as we talked softly, a number of curious tales about her life and Hermine’s. I had never known much of this side of life. Only in the theatrical world, occasionally, in earlier years had I come across similar existences—women as well as men who lived half for