Paul was one whose senses were exquisitely attuned.
"Mrs. Haswell--Loraine," he said, and his voice was seductively tender,
"you are unhappy."
Slowly she nodded her dark head and her voice was a whisper. "Yes....
Paul, I'm afraid I am just that."
It was the first time they had called each other by their first names.
It was the first time that the gradually ripening intimacy between them
had had a more propitious setting than a table at Sherry's. Paul Burton
had awaited this moment patiently, knowing that it must sometime come.
Now he bent toward her until her hair brushed his face.
"It is your right to find life a thing of joy," he whispered. "Your soul
is a flower. It should have the fulness and radiance of sunshine."
"Our rights," she said slowly, "are not always the things we get."
"But just why are you unhappy?" he insisted.
"I guess you summed it up in that one word, Paul ... captivity."
Paul Burton, the easily swayed, the facilely led, rose and paced up and
down, and after a few moments he halted before her.
"Doesn't he--your jailer--appreciate you, Loraine?"
She shrugged her lovely shoulders and looked up at him, smiling through
lashes that glistened a little.
"As much, I suppose, as a man can appreciate a woman whom he fails to
understand. It's not his fault."
"Of course he--cares for you?"
Loraine Haswell shot him a quick inquiring glance. "Yes," she smiled,
"he cares enough to persecute me with little jealousies. He cares enough
to want me to make love to him when--" she halted and put both hands
over her face; through her slight figure ran a faint shudder--"when I
can't."
The man pressed his tapering fingers to his temples. He must seem
agitated and his emotions lay so ready to call that seeming so was
almost being so. Yet in the back of his mind was the thought: "She will
be in my arms in five minutes."
Suddenly she rose from her seat. "I oughtn't to say such things to
you," she declared in a voice freighted with self-accusation. "Please
forget it, Paul. But it's a thing you can understand. You know the
emptiness of a life that deals only with material things."
He leaned forward with one knee on the bench and one hand on the
fountain basin. She was beautiful and his heart responded to her
beauty's challenge.
"To me you can say anything. In me you will always find one who has no
interest above your interests." He stopped and took her hands, but she
shook her head in gentle negation, and, as he obeyed the unuttered
mandate and let his own arms fall at his sides, she rewarded him with a
smile that thrilled him like an embrace.
"Len is fine and big and everybody likes him," went on the wife as
though bent on being fair at all costs. "Sometimes I think that's the
trouble. It's like being married to a standing army. In times of peace
one doesn't need a standing army and in times of war it's me that he
makes war on."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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