He held her firmly and continued to kiss the bare flesh of her shoulders and back, and then he ripped more of the dress away, and buried his face between her breasts, a strange, stricken, almost sobbing sound coming from his throat, as if even in that moment of primitive love-making he was begging her to relent a little, to forgive him and be tender, to run her fingers through his hair, as she had so often done in the past. But she was too frightened to do anything but struggle violently to free herself. Always in the past he had made love impetuously, his great strength sometimes causing him to hurt her a little. But never had his ardor gotten out of control and his hands moved over her trembling body in quite so demanding a way. He was pressing her to him so fiercely she felt half-smothered, his fingers bruising her thighs, her buttocks, refusing to relinquish their grip. She feared only his capacity for self-control, not that he would be deliberately cruel or brutally force her to submit to him against her will. But she did not know how far he could hold in check his desperate need to make this renewal of their intimacy a kind of masculine triumph so complete and overwhelming that it would bring them closer than they had ever been before and put an end to all future uncertainty. And in so doing, he might lose all awareness of his own strength and inflict an irreparable injury upon her. Her emotions were mixed, strange, verging on utter panic in that awful moment of smothering proximity, when his body seemed like a rod of steel bruising her from knee to shoulder and threatening to turn into a steel trap with cruel jaws which might snap shut at any moment, shattering the very bones of her body. She began to kick and moan, to beat with her fists on his shoulders. And then she was screaming at him, demanding that he release her, increasing with an energy she hardly knew that she possessed the frenzy of her twistings and turnings. How she ever managed to reach down and get a firm grip on her right slipper and wrench it off she never quite knew. Only that she had the slipper in her hand suddenly and was beating him on the face with it, hitting him on the side of his face with the high heel as hard as she could, and then across his forehead and not even stopping when he cried out and slapped her on the face with the flat of his hand. She struck at him again and again, not caring if she hurt him severely, because he was still refusing to release her and the slap had turned her into a wild woman. Some instinct, some lingering trace of sanity or compassion, prevented her from striking him across the eyes. But she didn't stop hitting him even when she saw a bright splotch of blood leap out on his right temple.