Page:Held to Answer (1916).pdf/67

 Hampstead learned an unusual number of things about women which, in his limited experience, he had either not known or which had not been brought home to him before. Some of these he presumed applied generally to all women; others, he had no doubt, were particular to Miss Dounay.

As, for instance, when he looked down at her face where it lay in the curve of his arm, he saw that the oval outline of her cheeks was startlingly perfect; that there were pools of liquid fire in her eyes; that her lips were beautifully and naturally red; that they were long, pliable, sensitive, with fleeting curves that raced like ripples upon these shores of velvet and ruby, expressing as they ran an infinite variety of passing moods. The chin, too, came in for a great deal of this attention. It was round and smooth at the corners, with a delicately chiseled vertical cleft in it, which at times ran up and met a horizontal cleft that appeared beneath the lower lip, when any slight breath of displeasure brought a pout to that ruby, pendant lobe. This meeting-place of the two clefts formed a kind of transitory dimple, a trysting-place of all sorts of fugitive attractions which exercised a singular fascination for the big man.

He used to wonder what the sensation would be like to sink his lips in that precious, delectable valley. It would have been physically simple. A slight lifting of his right arm and shoulder, a slight declension of his neck, and the mere instinctive planting of his lips, and the thing was done. However, John had no thought of doing this. In the first place he wouldn't—without permission; for he was a man of honor and of self-control. In the second place, he wouldn't because a woman was a thing very sacred to him, and a kiss, a deliberate and flesh-tingling kiss, was a caress to be held as sacred as the woman herself and for the expression of an emo-