Gloria and he had been equals, giving without
thought of thanks or obligation. To this girl his very caresses were an
inestimable boon. Crying quietly she had confessed to him that he was
not the first man in her life; there had been one other--he gathered
that the affair had no sooner commenced than it had been over.
Indeed, so far as she was concerned, she spoke the truth. She had
forgotten the clerk, the naval officer, the clothier's son, forgotten
her vividness of emotion, which is true forgetting. She knew that in
some opaque and shadowy existence some one had taken her--it was as
though it had occurred in sleep.
Almost every night Anthony came to town. It was too cool now for the
porch, so her mother surrendered to them the tiny sitting room, with its
dozens of cheaply framed chromos, its yard upon yard of decorative
fringe, and its thick atmosphere of several decades in the proximity of
the kitchen. They would build a fire--then, happily, inexhaustibly, she
would go about the business of love. Each evening at ten she would walk
with him to the door, her black hair in disarray, her face pale without
cosmetics, paler still under the whiteness of the moon.
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