He, too, had risen, and stood close before her. “Don't make a mistake about me,” he warned her; “there are a great many men whom it would be safer to tell this to. If I haven't had such a sharp struggle as you, I've been wondering--yes, when I should have been happiest--about the uselessness of most of living. I'm not safe at all.” “I don't want to be safe,” she whispered. With an involuntary and brutal movement he took her in his arms and kissed her with a flame-like and intolerable passion. She made no effort to avoid him, but met his embrace with an intensity that rivalled his own. When he released her she wavered and half fell on a chair across the low back of which her arm hung supinely. The lightning, he thought, had struck him. Winding in and through his surging, tempestuous emotion was an objective realization of what was happening to him: this wasn't a comfortable, superficially sensual affair such as he had had with Anette. 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. She exclaimed, “Oh!” in a small startled unfamiliar voice. This would not do, he told himself deliberately, with a separate emphasis on each word. William Grove might conceivably come in at any moment; and there was no hope, no possibility, of his wife quickly regaining her balance; she was as shattered, as limply weak, as though she were in a faint. “Savina,” he said, using for the first time that name, “you must get yourself together; I can't have you exposed like this to accident.” She smiled wanly, in response, and then sat upright moving her body, her arms, with an air of insuperable weariness. Her expression was dazed; but, instinctively, she rearranged her slightly disordered hair. “We must find out what has happened to us,” he went on, speaking with difficulty out of the turmoil of his being. “We are not young,” he repeated stupidly; “and not foolish. We won't let ourselves be carried away beyond--beyond return.” “You are so wise,” she assented, with an entire honesty of intention; but her phrase mocked him ferociously. 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. He couldn't, he hadn't the inclination to, do less. Reaching up, she drew her fingers down his sleeves until they rested in his gripping hands. Her palms clung to his, and then she broke away from him: