Page:The Yellow Book - 08.djvu/61

vaguely, as it seemed, unmeaningly—of a public ball she had once gone to (a rare thing with her, she didn't care enough for dancing to pay for it, she always said), a ball at which were to be seen many people of whose manners and customs she was entirely ignorant. A scene she had witnessed there! . . . the remembrance possessed her, a kind of unconscious cerebration, for which she could not account.

A corridor, once more almost deserted, save for herself and her partner, and, at the farther end, another couple, people she had never seen before; the girl, flaunting, ill-dressed, in a gown of insistently meagre insufficiency, her hair heaped into unmeaning shapelessness, nowhere an outline, a severity, a grave dainty coquetry; the effect was almost pathetic in its dull, bold cheapness. And the man!—hardly more, indeed, than a boy—he bore the huddled indistinctness, the look of imperfect detachment from the atmosphere, whose opposite we convey by the word "distinction."

So, in a glance, she had seen them; and, with a kind of absent curiosity, had watched them while she talked . . . Quite suddenly the man slipped to the ground beside his partner's chair, and passed his arm familiarly, jocosely, round her unreluctant waist. A moment more and their faces touched, their lips met, in a kiss . . . one which, it was abundantly evident, was not of deep feeling, or even the expression of an instant's real emotion; no, there was an ineffable commonness, a painful coarsening of the action, visible even to unaccustomed eyes . . . it was "sport."

The girl had probably invited it; the man, more than probably, was not the first who had been privileged. . . .

She had felt revolted.

Her partner had made some contemptuous remark: "Can't they do it in private! If she likes being hugged———" Themere