It was a very cool, hard
hand--not in the least like Violet's pretty little product of creams and
manicure.
"She's _some_ girl," he thought. "And what a blazing wonder that she'll
look at me. Yet I can twist her round my little finger--on occasions
like to-night."
By a very humanly understandable metempsychosis she became just a little
less shining because more reachable; some of her shine transferred to
him. His conception of the whole thing was physical; hers was not
consciously physical at all. But as she lay, long after he was asleep,
watching the candles fade one by one, leaving a fainter purple in the
sky, she felt vaguely disappointed; all this business of love-making
seemed to mean so much less to Louis than it did to her; he did not take
it seriously, or rather he did not make it the high feast she found it.
He could be flippant about it. For her it broke down every barrier,
every reservation. Louis was able to come down immediately from ecstasy
to everyday things. This, she argued, meant that he had not flown so
very high after all. He was able to make a laughing, half-embarrassed
remark to the effect that he hoped no one else was on the roofs round
about. She would not have cared if everyone in Sydney was on the roofs.
For her no one existed just then but Louis. That had jarred a little.
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