The girl disengaged her hand. She looked down and away.
“Won’t you?” he insisted.
“I ought not to,” she said at last.
“But why?”
With her parasol the girl poked at the carpet. “Because it is not right. It is not right that I should.” But at once, with a little convulsive intake of the breath, she added, “Yet I do.”
Then it seemed to her that the room was turning around, that the walls had receded, that there was but blankness. His lips were on hers. In their contact everything ceased to be save the consciousness of something so poignant, so new, that to still the pain of the joy of it she struggled to be free.
Kissing her again Loftus let her go. Dizzily she got from the sofa. The parasol had fallen. Her hat was awry. To straighten it she moved to a mirror. Her face was scarlet. Instantly fear possessed her, fear not of him but of herself. With uncertain fingers she tried to adjust the hat.
“I must go.”
But Loftus came to her. Bending a bit he whispered in her ear: “Don’t go—don’t go ever.”
Do what she might she could not manage with her hat. In the glass it was no longer that which she saw, nor her face, but an abyss, suddenly precipitate, that had opened there.
“No, don’t go,” Loftus was saying. “I love you and you love me.”
It was, though, not love that was emotionalizing her then. It was fear. A fear of that abyss and of the lower depths beneath.