nerve a tingling electric
force. She felt his lips quest along her cheek and discover the soft
little spot just behind her ear. She followed the restless course of his
hands across her shoulders, down her arm, lingeringly over her hand. His
hand seemed to her to have an existence quite apart from him, to have a
mysterious existence of its own. In silence they rested there. She kept
wondering if his shoulder had not been made just for her cheek. With
little shivers she realized that this was his shoulder, Walter's, a
man's, as the rough cloth prickled her skin. Silent they were, and for a
time secure, but she kept speculating as to what he would dare to do
next--and she fancied that he was speculating about precisely the same
thing.

He drew a catching breath, and suddenly her lips were opening to his.

"Oh, you mustn't--you promised--" she moaned, when she was able to draw
back her head.

Again he kissed her, quickly, then released her and began to talk
rapidly of--nothing. Apropos of offices and theaters and the tides of
spring, he was really telling her that, powerful though his restless
curiosity was, greatly though their poor little city bodies craved each
other, yet he did respect her. She scarce listened, for at first she was
bemused by two thoughts. She was inquiring sorrowfully whether it was
only her body that stirred him--whether he found any spark in her honest
little mind. And, for her second thought, she was considering in an
injured way that this was not love as she had read of it in novels. "I
didn't know just what it would be--but I didn't think it would be like
this," she declared.

Love, as depicted in such American novels by literary pastors and
matrons of perfect purity as had sifted into the Panama public library,
was an affair of astounding rescues from extreme peril, of highly proper
walks in lanes, of laudable industry on the part of the hero, and of not
more than three kisses--one on the brow, one on the cheek, and, in the
very last paragraph of the book, one daringly but reverently deposited
upon the lips. These young heroes and heroines never thought about
bodies at all, except when they had been deceived in a field of
asterisks. So to Una there was the world-old shock at the earthiness of
love--and the penetrating joy of that earthiness. If real love was so
much more vulgar than she had supposed, yet also it was so much more
overwhelming that she was glad to be a flesh-and-blood lover, b