Adultery -- Fiction; Cuba -- Fiction; Runaway husbands -- Fiction
His thoughts had become so inappropriate to his purpose, his presence,
here that he banished them and returned to Savina. She was notably more
cheerful than when he had left her, and was engaged with an omelet,
rough bread, Scotch preserved strawberries, and a bottle of Marquis de
Riscal; most of which, she told him, had been sent, together with
other pleasant things, by Daniel Randon. She was unusually seductive in
appearance, with, over the sheer embroidered beauty of her underclothes,
her graceful silken knees, a floating unsubstantial wrap like crushed
handfuls of lilacs. “This room kills anything I might put on,” she
replied to the expression of his pleasure. “After all, we shall soon be
gone. I got Daniel's servant to telegraph the Inglaterra we were coming
back. They'll have to watch out for us. After we see your brother there,
and make a beginning of our rearrangements, we will go on, I think. Do
you mind? South, Guadeloupe, perhaps, because it's so difficult to get
to, and then Brazil. I have an idea we won't stay there long, either,
but travel on toward the East. I do like islands, and there are
quantities, quarts, to see in the Pacific.” She put her arms, from which
the wide sleeves fell back, around his neck, drew him close to her. “It
doesn't matter where I am, if it is with you. I love you, Lee, and I am
happy because I know we'll always have each other. We are not so very
young, you see, and there isn't a great deal of time left, not enough to
grow tired, to change in.
“I wake up at night, sometimes, with that tiresome pain at my heart, as
though it were too full of you, and, for a little, I'm confused--it is
all so strange. I think, for a moment, that I am still with William,
and I can't imagine what has happened to the room. It frightens me
dreadfully, and then I remember: it isn't William and the house on
Sixty-sixth Street, but you, Lee, and Cuba. We're together with nothing
in the world to spoil our joy. And, when we are old, we shall sit side
by side at Etretat, I am sure, and watch the sea, and the young people
in love under the gay marquees, and remember. Then we'll be married and
more respectable than the weather-vanes. I want that on your account;
I don't care; but you would worry, I am afraid. You are serious and a
conscientious man, Lee.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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