WEBVTT

NOTE V. Vera

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CHAPTER V. VIRA

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1. By this time I had become a frequent visitor in the Galt household. A summer had passed since my first appearance there.

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The second time I came to dinner, Vera presented herself, though tardily. As she entered the dining room, Galt rose and made her an exaggerated bow, which she altogether disregarded.

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All got up this evening, he said, squinting at her when she was seated.

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That she disregarded too, looking cold and bored.

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She wore a black party gown of some very filmy stuff, cut rather low, with an effect of elaborate

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simplicity.

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A small solitary gem gleamed in her blue-black hair and a point of light shone in each of

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her eyes.

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She was forbiddingly resplendent, with an immemorial jewel-like quality.

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She derived entirely from her mother, and in no particular resembled her father.

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He tried another Sally.

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Isn't it chilly over there by you, Vera Child?

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He asked, ironically solicitous.

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Instantly she replied, Yes, father dear, won't you bring me my scarf, please?

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After that he let her alone.

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When dinner was over, he took me off to his room again, and we passed another evening

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with the railroads.

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No dinner passed without some glow of the feud between Galt and Vera.

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They seldom saw each other at any other time.

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Her habits were luxurious.

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She never came down to breakfast.

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He delighted to torment her, and always came off with the worst of it.

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Perhaps he secretly enjoyed that, too.

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She was more than a match for him.

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Their methods were very different.

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He taunted and teased without finesse.

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She retorted with cold, keen thrusts, which left him sprawling and helpless.

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In a pinch, she turned upon him that astonishing trick she had of looking at people without

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seeing them.

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The experience, as I knew, was crushing.

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It never failed to make him fume.

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Gradually I perceived the nature of their antagonism.

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Natalie was her father's playfellow, but Vera fascinated him.

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He admired her tremendously and feared her not a little.

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She baffled, eluded, and ignored him.

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The only way he could get her attention was to bully her, which he did simply for the

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reason that he could not let her alone.

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But there was something on her side, too.

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For once I noticed that when he had failed to open hostilities, she subtly provoked him

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to do so.

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They both enjoyed it, unconsciously.

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Between the sisters there was a fiercely repressed antagonism.

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Natalie was four years the younger, and much less subtle, but in the gentle art of scratching,

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she was the other's equal.

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Both were extremely dexterous, and played the game in good sportsmanship.

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I saw Mr Shaw at the matinee today, Natalie announced one evening.

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After a slight pause, she added, He seems miraculously recovered.

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I never saw him looking so well.

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I happened to catch a twinkle, where, of all places, but in the eyes of Grandma.

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She looked for an instant quite human.

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But it was too late to save me, for I had already asked, What was he ill of?

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Something that's never fatal, apparently, said Natalie demurely, fetching a little sigh.

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Then I understood that what a person named Shaw had miraculously recovered from was an

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infatuation for the elder sister, and for my stupidity I got a disdainful glance from

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Vera.

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Another time Natalie said to Vera, I shall see the handsome Professor Atwood tomorrow,

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may I tell him you are mad about him?

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Yes, dear, said Vera, he will draw the right conclusion.

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The barb of that retort was hidden, but it did its work.

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Natalie blushed furiously and subsided.

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Mrs. Galt surveyed the field of these amenities with a neutral, mind-weary air.

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She never took part, never interfered, would not appear to be even listening, though in

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fact she missed nothing, and never failed in the embarrassing after-moment to provide

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a Lightning Conductor, a Swift Bridge or a Rescue Raft, as the need was.

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She seemed to do this mechanically, with not the slightest effort.

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And although her topics were commonplace, that was not necessarily an indication of

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what her mind was like.

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The want at those moments was for easy, thoughtless conversation, and therefore trite subjects

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served best.

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Her own interest in them was never sustained.

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1.

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One evening as dinner was finishing, Vera looked at me across the table and said,

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Won't you come sometime to tea when father can't have you all to himself? He hates tea.

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I was startled and absurdly thrilled, but the curious feeling was that I became in that instant

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an object of curiosity and solicitude mingled, as one marked by fate for a certain experience.

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I got this particularly from Natalie, who glanced first at me with an anxious expression,

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and then at her sister.

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We are always at home Sunday afternoon, said Mrs. Galt.

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I was the only caller the next Sunday.

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Galt did not appear.

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Tea was served in that middle room, between the parlor and dining room, which was a domain

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over which Vera exercised feudal rights.

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That was why it was more attractive than any other part of the house.

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It expressed something of her personality.

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was low-spirited and artificial, Natalie was not her sparkling self, Mrs. Galt was in her

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usual state of preoccupation, though very gracious and helpful in warding off silences.

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I do not know how these things are managed.

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Presently, Vera and I were alone.

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I asked her to play.

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Her performance, though finished and accurate, was so empty that I said without thought,

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Why don't you let yourself go?

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Like this, she said, turning back.

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And then, having no music in front of her, she played a strange, tumultuous Russian thing

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with extraordinary power.

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I begged her to go on.

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Instead, she left the piano abruptly and stood for a minute far away at the window with her

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back to me, breathing rapidly, not from the exertion of playing, I thought, but from the

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and the emotional excitement of it.

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Then she called me to come and look at a group of Sunday strollers passing in the street,

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three men and two women, strange dark aliens full of hot slothful life.

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The men around their middles wore striped sashes ending in fringe and no coats like

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opera brigands.

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The women were draped in flaming shawls.

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All of them wore earrings.

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What are they? she asked. Immigrants, I guessed, from some odd corner of southern Europe, who hadn't been here long enough to get out of their native costume.

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They will be drabs soon enough, she said, turning away.

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I wanted to talk of her playing, being now enthusiastic about it, but she put the subject aside, saying, please don't. And we talked instead of pictures.

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There was a special exhibition of old masters at the Metropolitan Museum, which she hadn't seen. Wouldn't I like to go?

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It came out presently that she painted. I asked to see some of her things and she got them out, two or three landscapes and some studies of the nude.

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She had just begun working in a life class, she said.

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Very interesting, I said, trying to get the right emphasis and knowing instantly that it had failed.

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She gathered them up slowly and put them away.

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They are like your playing, I added, as you played at first.

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How do you mean?

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I mean you somehow hinder your self-expression.

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I do not let myself go.

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Is that what you mean?

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Precisely.

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What are you afraid of?

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Then you believe in letting oneself go, she asked.

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Well, why not?

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Suppose one isn't sure of one's stopping places.

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We became involved in a discussion of the moralities, hitherto, present and future, tending to become audacious.

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This is a pastime by means of which, in first acquaintance, two persons of opposite sex may indulge their curiosity with perfect security.

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The subject is abstract. The tone is impersonal. Neither one knows how far the other will go.

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go. They dare each other to follow, one step at a time, and are both surprised at the ground

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they can make. There is at the same time an inaudible exchange, which is even more thrilling,

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for that is personal. This need never be acknowledged. If the abstract does not lead naturally to

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the concrete, then the whole conversation remains impersonal, and the inaudible part

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may be treated as if it had never occurred. That is the basic rule of the game.

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Her courage amazed me. I began to see what she meant by supposing that one might not

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be sure of one's stopping places. She had been reading Frantz, Stendhal, Zola, Shaw,

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Pater, Ibsen, Strindberg and Nietzsche.

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Mrs. Galt reappeared.

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We are debating the sins of Babylon, I said. She smiled and asked me to dinner.

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That was the beginning. We went the next Sunday to the Metropolitan Museum, and one evening that same week to the theater.

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What we set out to see was an English play that everyone was talking about.

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At the last minute she asked if the tickets might be changed.

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and when I asked her where we would go instead she naively mentioned a musical

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comedy much more talked about than the English play for very different reasons

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afterwards when I asked her what part of the show she liked best she said the way

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people laughed life transacting thrilled her contact with people especially in

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free noisy crowds produced in her a kind of intoxication we walked a great deal

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in the pulsating streets, often till late at night, and that she enjoyed more than the play, the opera, or any other form of entertainment.

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Her curiosity was insatiable. She was always for going a little further, for prying still deeper into the secrets of humanity's gregarious business, afraid, yet venturesome and insistent.

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She would pick out of the throng whimsical, weird, and dreadful personalities, and we would follow them for blocks.

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Once at a corner we came suddenly upon a woman importuning a man.

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She was richly gowned and not in any way common. He was sinister, sated, and cruel.

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She had lost her head, her pride, her sense of everything but wanting him.

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We were close enough to hear.

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He spoke in a low admonishing tone, imploring her not to make a scene.

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She grew louder all the time, saying, I don't care, I don't care, and continued alternately

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to assail him with revealing reproaches and to entreat him caressingly, until they both

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seemed quite naked in the lighted street.

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The man was contemptible, the woman was tragic.

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I took Vera by the arm to move her away, but she was fixed between horror and attraction

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and stood there regarding them in the fascinated way one looks at deadly serpents through the

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glass at the zoo.

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The man at last yielded with a bored gesture, called a cab, whisked the woman into it and

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the scene vanished.

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Vera shuddered and we walked on.

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We explored the East Side at night, visiting the Chinese and Jewish theatres, Hungarian

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coffee houses and dance halls.

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Nobody had ever done this kind of thing with her before.

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It was a new experience, and she adored it.

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Of what she did with it in her mind, I knew almost nothing.

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Emotions in the abstract she would discuss with the utmost simplicity.

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Her own she guarded jealously.

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One evening late, with a particularly interesting nocturnal adventure behind us, we stood in

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the hallway saying good night.

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We said it and lingered, said it again, and still lingered.

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She was more excited than usual.

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Her lips were slightly parted.

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She almost never blushed, but on rare occasions, such as now, there was a feeling of pink beneath

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the deep brunette color of her skin.

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Her beauty seemed of a sudden to expand, to become greatly exaggerated, not in quality

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but in dimensions, so that it excluded all else from the sense of space.

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The light of it unpoised me, and she knew, I could feel that she knew.

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My impulse toward her grew stronger and stronger, tending to become irresistible.

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This she knew also, yet she lingered.

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Then I seized and kissed her.

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At the first touch her whole weight fell in my arms.

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Her eyes closed, her head dropped backward, face up turned.

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She trembled violently and sighed as if every string of tension in her being snapped.

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How little we can save of those enormous moments in which the old, old body-mind remembers

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all that ever happened.

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What was it that one knew so vividly in that coextensive, panoramic, timeless interval,

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and cannot now recall?

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The first kiss goes a journey, the second stays on earth, the first one is a meeting

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in the void, then this world again.

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Vera, Vera, I whispered.

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Her eyes opened.

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The look they gave me was so unexpected, so unnatural in the circumstances, that I had

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a start of terror lest she had gone out of herself.

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Then I recognized it.

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This was she whom I had forgotten.

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These were those impervious, scornful carnelian eyes you could not see into.

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The old hot and cold feeling came over me again, and though she still lay in my arms,

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Without having moved at all, it was now as if I were not touching her, as if I never

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had.

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I released her.

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Without a word, she turned and walked slowly up the stairway out of sight.

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The next whole day was one of utter, lonely wretchedness, supported only by a feeling

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of resentment.

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I found myself humming, coming through the rye, and wondering why, as it was a ditty

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I had not remembered for years.

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When it came to me, why?

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If a body kiss a body, need a body cry?

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What had I done that was so terrible after all?

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I went to the Galt's for dinner uninvited, as now I often did.

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Vera did not appear.

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She was reported to be indisposed.

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I passed the evening with Galt in his study and left early.

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Natalie was alone in the parlor reading.

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She came into the hall as I was putting on my coat and laid a hand on my arm consolingly.

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You won't stop coming, will you? she asked.

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What do you mean?

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They always do, she said, and some of them are so nice, like you.

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Natalie, what are you talking about?

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Father would miss you terribly, she said.

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I promised whatever it was she wanted.

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She shook hands on it and watched me down the steps.

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The next evening I called after dinner.

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Vera was out.

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I wrote her a note of expostulation, then one in anger and a third in terms that were

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abject.

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And she answered none of them.

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3.

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In this state of suspense, an enormous time elapsed, three weeks at least.

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For me, Vera was non-existent in her father's house.

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When I was there for dinner, she never came down.

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There was a pretense that her absence was unnoticeable.

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Nobody spoke of it.

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Nobody mentioned her name.

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In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, I could not rid myself of the notion that

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I had become an object of sympathy in the household.

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One afternoon I had been in to see Galt, who was ill, and as I let myself out through the

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front door, there was Vera, at the bottom of the steps, in conversation with a huge

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of Money and Credit

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of Money and Credit

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of Money and Credit

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saw me obliquely and turned her attention more to him with a subtle excluding gesture.

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Evidently she wished me to pass.

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Instead I waited, watching them until he became conscious of the situation and cast off with

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a large various manner which comprehended me.

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As she came up the steps toward me, slowly but with unblurred definite movements, hard

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to the sake of desire, yet soft and voluptuous to the forbidden sense of touch.

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With a kind of bird-like beauty, I could not for a moment imagine that I had ever kissed

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her, much less that she had responded to a ruffling caress.

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I forgot what I was going to do, or by what right I meant to do anything.

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I was cold and hopeless, with a sudden sense of fatigue, and might have suffered her to

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to pass me in silence as she wished to do, but for the look she gave me on reaching the

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top.

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That was her mistake.

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It was the old, impersonal, trampling look to which anger was the one self-saving reply.

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I took her by the arm and turned her face about.

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We are going for a walk, I said, moving her with me down the steps.

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I counted upon her horror of a scene to give me the brutal advantage, and it did.

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She came unresistingly, yet it was in no sense a victory.

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She submitted to a situation she could not control, but contemptuously, with no respect

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or fear for the force controlling it.

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We walked in silence to a tea shop in Fifth Avenue, and when we were seated and the waiter

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came, her respect for appearances made her speak.

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Get some tea please, she said sweetly, and those were the only words she uttered.

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Her defense was to stare at me as if I were reciting a tedious tale.

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It bored her.

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Once I thought she repressed a yawn.

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That was when I began to say the same things over again.

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She was without any vanity of self-justification.

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Not for an instant did she avert her eyes.

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She looked at me steadily, unblinkingly, and with a kind of reptilian indifference.

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She could see into me.

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I could not see into her.

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In the end, I became abusive.

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Then, if at all, there was a faint suspicion of interest.

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A fool there was who loved the basilisk, I said.

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He who plucks that icy flame will be destroyed, but not consumed.

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Shall we go?

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I like still to remember that she did not smile at this idiotic apostrophe.

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Every man, I suppose, says a thing like that once, if he can.

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We rose at once.

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We walked all the way back in silence.

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I did not go in, but handed her up the steps and left her without good night.

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On the next day but one, a note came.

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Would I meet her for tea at the same place?

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She was prompt and purposeful.

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He waited until tea was served, then put it aside and spoke.

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Why do all men, though by different ways, come to the same place?

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I know nothing about all men, I said.

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It's enough to know about myself.

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I'm not very sure of that.

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They all do, she said, reflectively.

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But I want to marry you, I said, with emphasis on the personal pronoun.

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Yes, that too, she said, with a saturated air.

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Oh, weary Olympia, I said, how stands the score?

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How many loves lie beheaded in your chamber of horrors?

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Or do you bury them decently and tend their graves?

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You try me, she said, with no change of voice or color.

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It is very stupid.

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Man takes without leave the smallest thing and presumes upon that to erect preposterous

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Sensuous Claims Take our case.

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I begin by liking you.

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I invite you to a friendship.

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You are free to accept or decline.

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You accept.

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Where in so far have you acquired rights in me?

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We find this relation agreeable and extend it.

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All of this is voluntary.

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Nothing is surrendered under compulsion.

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We are both free.

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Then, suddenly, you overwhelm me by a sensuous impulse.

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It is a wanton, ravishing act.

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I resent it by the only peaceable means in my power, that is, I avoid you.

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Immediately you assail me with violent reproaches as by a right.

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Is it the invader's right of might?

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Is human relationship a state of war?

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Don't interrupt me, please.

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And now, when I have come to say that under certain conditions I am prepared to make an

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There was a retort, but I withheld it.

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How shall man tell woman she hath provoked him to it?

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If he tell her, she will wither him.

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Yet if the sight, smell, and sound of her provoke him not, then is she mortally offended?

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He shall see without looking, and be damned if he looks without seeing.

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It is so.

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But she divined my thoughts.

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If a woman gives, it is quite the same, she went on, only worse.

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For in that case he presumes upon what he has received by favor to become lord of all

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that she has.

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I lie in the dust, I said.

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I know the pose, she said, with a lighter touch.

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Happily, it is absurd.

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If it were not that, it would be contemptible.

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Well, pitiless woman, what would you have a man to be and do?

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Let us suppose provisionally that I ask out of deep religious curiosity.

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I may not like the part.

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How should a man behave with you?

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I dislike you very much at this moment, she replied.

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By an effort, I remember that you have saving qualities.

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Did you hear me say that I was prepared to make an exception?

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It may be too late, I said.

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What are the terms?

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You said, under certain conditions.

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She frowned, hesitated, and went on slowly.

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It is my castle.

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You may dwell there.

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You may come and go.

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You may make free of it in discretion, agreeably to our joint pleasure, provided you forego

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beforehand all rights accruing from use and tenure.

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We debated the contract in a high, ceremonious manner.

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It was agreed that the bargain, if made, should terminate automatically at the instant I should

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presume to make the slightest demand upon her.

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As if, for instance, I should demand the key to the Chamber of Horrors, I said whimsically.

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Exactly, she replied.

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I stipulated, not in earnest, of course, that she should make no demands upon me.

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was implied, she said, we make it explicit. When at last I accepted unreservedly, she

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put forth her hand in a full, generous gesture, and the pact was sealed. We walked homeward

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on a perfectly restored basis of friendship, changed our minds at the last minute, went

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instead to a restaurant, then to the theater, and passed a joyous evening together.