When he released her she wavered and half fell on a
chair across the low back of which her arm hung supinely. The
lightning, he thought, had struck him. Winding in and through his
surging, tempestuous emotion was an objective realization of what was
happening to him: this wasn't a comfortable, superficially sensual
affair such as he had had with Anette. He had seen, in steel mills,
great shops with perspectives of tremendous irresistible machines, and
now he had the sensation of having been thrown, whirling, among them.
Savina's head went so far back that her throat was strained in a white
bow. He kissed her again, with his hands crushing the cool metallic
filaments of the artificial flowers on her shoulders. She exclaimed,
"Oh!" in a small startled unfamiliar voice. This would not do, he told
himself deliberately, with a separate emphasis on each word. William
Grove might conceivably come in at any moment; and there was no hope,
no possibility, of his wife quickly regaining her balance; she was as
shattered, as limply weak, as though she were in a faint. "Savina," he
said, using for the first time that name, "you must get yourself
together; I can't have you exposed like this to accident."
She smiled wanly, in response, and then sat upright moving her body,
her arms, with an air of insuperable weariness. Her expression was
dazed; but, instinctively, she rearranged her slightly disordered hair.
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