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The black brocade mules by her bed were characteristic of her useless charming objects that had cost twenty, thirty, dollars. Their sliding tap on the glazed floor was an appreciable part of his happiness; Savina's bottles on a dressing-table were engraved crystal with gold stoppers: it was all as it should be.
Savina didn't want to go back to the hotel, their room; and, after dinner at the Paris, they went to Carmelo, where they alternated northern dances with the stridor of a northern cabaret and drinks. Savina's spirits revived slowly. To Lee she seemed to have changed in appearance since she left New York here, losing her air of a constant reserve, she looked younger, daring.
The tide of his own emotion was gathering around him with the force of a sea like that of which she had already, vividly, spoken. There was damned little of what could be recognized as admissible wisdom in him. Instead of that he was being inundated by a recklessness of desire that reached Savina's desperate indifference to what, however threatening, might overtake her.
"There is nothing for you to do here, and you may as well come to the batey with me. There are some accidents that cannot be provided against. This is one of them. She will be attended to; but you must explain about the cables." "I had better get her things," Lee replied. He couldn't leave the delicate and beautiful trifles of Savina's living in the blue vault above.
And that isn't true; we have never had a bit of serious trouble." She rose, coming around to him: "That wasn't a very nice kiss we had when you came in. I was horrid." Lee Randon kissed her again. The cool familiarity of her lips was blurred in the remembered clinging intensity of Savina's mouth.
He had seen, in steel mills, great shops with perspectives of tremendous irresistible machines, and now he had the sensation of having been thrown, whirling, among them. Savina's head went so far back that her throat was strained in a white bow. He kissed her again, with his hands crushing the cool metallic filaments of the artificial flowers on her shoulders.
Even as she lay, prostrate, on the bed, he could see her collapse; the strength, animation, interest, drained away from her; it seemed to Lee that momentarily she was again in a coma. He leaned over and placed a hand on her brow. Savina's eye-lids fluttered. Under her breast her heart was scarcely discernible.
They were, again, reaching Washington, close in a taxi-cab; Savina's jewel case again fell unheeded; and again, after the shortest halt possible, they were whirling south in a drawing-room where night and day were indistinguishable one from the other.
In this he was inferior, he became even slightly ridiculous they couldn't continue kissing each other with the same emphasis hour after hour, and the emphasis could not be indefinitely multiplied; rather than meet the crescendo he drew into his region of cental obscurity. Lee had to do this, he reminded himself, in view of Savina's utter surrender: he was responsible for whatever happened.
Savina's fast superficial breathing now dominated the room. He was again seated beside her, leaden-hearted and blank. It was so useless this illness and suffering, now! The doctor had seemed to insinuate that it might be traced to him, Lee Randon. What the devil did he mean by that? It was the fault of Daniel, the immobile, as much as anyone.
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