And she looked back.
For a moment, the shadow stood still--stood still, and dissipated.
A wanton expression, brief and Lilith-like, reshaped the sharp, carmine
edges of her mouth. She saw me not as the uncle of her now-beloved,
but as the detached person--another man--and in this seeing me, she
involuntarily recalled her long affair with lust. I have heard a woman
say that, by merely quivering her underlip in a certain fashion, she
had been able to change the tone, attention, and interest of nine
men in ten with whom she'd ever talked--and there was nothing in her
history to make me doubt the statement. And I have heard another woman
say that all there was to Rudolph Valentino was the dilation of his
nostrils. Watching Marcia's mouth, I could understand the sense of
such matters.
So I was sure of still another thing.
Hattie Blaine had been dubious of her. Hattie had made the
suggestion--the to me profoundly immoral suggestion--of tempting this
girl.
Hattie had done it out of an unconscious notion that Marcia had some
point in her nature which could not be lent to the kind of marriage
Paul would need.
It wasn't money.
It was mood.
Marcia caught me making this observation. She blushed a little, glanced
at the table, and then raised her eyes--but whether anxiously or in a
repetition of the look, I could not tell.
Passionate women are seldom ashamed of their passion.
What she felt was not bold; it was not arch; it was not mercenary; it
was--simply--an essence of her own responses. A belonging, like the
curved shape of her eyebrows or the narrowness of her red nails--which
she accepted as no more and no less than that, and revealed as
naturally.