er wrists with one hand was out of the
question; for two or three delicious, angry moments he essayed this,
enraged, amused, breathing hard, while she strained and bent with all
her magnificent youth against him, and the years and the rust of the
years fell off from him in the heartsome contest, with victory certain
but not easy, her submission sure--but not yet! Some subterranean
spring welled up in him, some trickle from the everlasting caves that
will only be completely levelled over when humanity, decadent,
crumbles into them and returns to the primal clay, and he knew that
for these few gleaming seconds, snatched from the rest of the greyish
hours and weeks, he had been made and destined.

You will, of course, perceive that all this is what I felt when my
little turn came; Roger never talked this sort of thing in his life.
But unless I am vastly mistaken, he lived it, in those galloping
quick-breathed minutes, before he pinioned Margarita, her hands behind
her back, with one arm, and held her fast about the knees with the
other. Crushed against him, dead weight, she lay, her unconquered eyes
sea black now, flat against his, her heart labouring heavily, under
his relentless, banding arm.

"Will you be good, you absurd little wildcat? Will you?" he demanded,
his voice shaking with laughter and triumph. (And you need not be too
ready, O exponent of tolerant hearthstone chivalry, to smile at the
triumph! V--l, whom Margarita detested, practically refused to sing
_Siegfried_ to her _Bruenhilde_, because, he said, she made him
ridiculous with her virginal strugglings and got him out of breath
besides! And he could lift and carry Lilli Lehmann.)

"Will you?" Roger repeated, not loosening his hold of her, for he felt
her muscles tense as wire under the soft flesh.

"No, I will not," said Margarita. "I hate you. I will die before I
will obey you."

And at this foolish and melodramatic remark, Roger Bradley, descendant
of all the Puritans (Whistler used to say that he was by Plymouth Rock
out of Mayflower--alas, dear Jimmie!), a respected bachelor, of
exemplary habits and no entanglements, deliberately, and with a
happy, heartfelt oath, kissed Margarita, at length and somewhat
brutally, I fear, in a hired four-wheeler at the junction of
Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue. And of his sensations at this
point I cannot speak, because I never had them. I never kissed
Margarita but once and then very quickly, because I w