at would be called
a flirtation. It did not seem so to her, and it was true that after that
first night at the Country Club the quality of flirtation somehow fell
away. Afterwards, when it became the thing that made her life, she
looked back in wonderment to the light little way it had begun. That too
did not seem as it should be--that a thing of such tremendous and
ruthless power, a thing that swept her whole life on at its will, should
come into life in a way so slight, so light, so much of chance. At first
it was just the faintest little breath; but it stirred something, it
grew, it became a great wind that there was no force anywhere to combat.
In that first year there was between them, unspoken of, a consciousness
of feeling touched in the other, a sense of the disturbance, the pull.
It seemed very wonderful to her that just his presence in the room could
make her feel alive in a way she had never felt alive before. And it was
sweet almost beyond belief, it was intoxicating, to come to know that
her presence was that same strange wine to him. She had seen his eyes
anxiously rove a crowded room and stop with her, his face lighting. She
loved remembering his face once at a card party of the older crowd where
she had been tardily summoned by a disappointed hostess. He had been in
the room several minutes, she watching him unseen. He was not looking
anxiously about this time, as she had seen him do at the dancing
parties. She thought he looked tired as he and his wife came in, not as
if anticipating pleasure. Then he saw her and she never forgot that leap
of glad surprise in his eyes, the quick change in him, the new buoyancy.

She would have supposed, thinking back to it afterward, that she would
have drawn back; that before feeling really broke through, a girl such
as she, reared as she had been, a part of such a society, a girl, as
they afterward said, who should have known right from wrong would, in
that time of its gathering, have drawn back from so shameful a thing as
love with another woman's husband. It was as mystifying to her that she
did not fight against it as it was that it should have come. She did not
understand the one nor the other. Certainly it was not as she would have
supposed it would be had she heard of such a thing. Something seemed to
have caught her up, to have taken her. She was appalled at times, but
the truth was that she was carried along almost without resistance;
ideas of resistance were t