He could say "No!" neither to man nor woman;
borrower and temptress alike found him tender-minded and pliable. Indeed
he seldom made decisions at all, and when he did they were but
half-hysterical resolves formed in the panic of some aghast and
irreparable awakening.
The particular weakness he indulged on this occasion was his need of
excitement and stimulus from without. He felt that for the first time in
four years he could express and interpret himself anew. The girl
promised rest; the hours in her company each evening alleviated the
morbid and inevitably futile poundings of his imagination. He had become
a coward in earnest--completely the slave of a hundred disordered and
prowling thoughts which were released by the collapse of the authentic
devotion to Gloria that had been the chief jailer of his insufficiency.
On that first night, as they stood by the gate, he kissed Dorothy and
made an engagement to meet her the following Saturday. Then he went out
to camp, and with the light burning lawlessly in his tent, he wrote a
long letter to Gloria, a glowing letter, full of the sentimental dark,
full of the remembered breath of flowers, full of a true and exceeding
tenderness--these things he had learned again for a moment in a kiss
given and taken under a rich warm moonlight just an hour before.
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