" Her emotion was
so strong that it drew her away from him, erect, with her bare arms
reaching to their fullest quivering length. In the blue gloom of the
room shuttered against the white day, with her wrap, the color of
lilacs, lightly clasping her shoulders, she seemed to be a vision in
subdued paint. Lee was held motionless, outside, by the fervor of an
appeal to fate rather than to him. She was, the thought recurred to
him, too slender, fragile, to contain such a passion. Then, in a
transition so sudden that it bewildered him, her mouth was against his,
her hands straining him to her. She was ugly then, her face was
unrecognizable in an expression of paralysed fury.
The heat, Lee protested, grew worse with evening; not a stir of air
brought out the dry scraping rustle of the palms, a sound like the
friction of thin metal plates. The balcony, if possible, was worse than
their room. In his irritation Lee cursed the scruples of his brother;
Savina, prostrate on the bed, said nothing. At intervals her hand
moved, waving a paper fan with a printed idyl from Boucher, given her
in a caf? at Havana. She had none of the constrained modesty, the sense
of discomfort at her own person, so dominating in Fanny. Lee finally
lighted a lamp: the hours, until the precipitant onrush of night,
seemed stationary; gigantic moths fluttered audibly about the
illumination and along the dim ceiling.
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