Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/162

 circles would have been a formal recognition of the relationship between Clare and himself.

"When you two get married," Mrs. Hamel said once, "pa and I were thinking maybe you could use the parlor until you get on your feet. We don't need it much, and it's bigger than Clare's room."

"I haven't even got a job yet," he parried.

"Well, you're young and able-bodied. You'll get something."

The trap was closing. He glanced at Clare, but she gazed fixedly at her plate. Afterwards, in the parlor with the door closed and the newly painted stove sending a thick odor of burning blacking into the room, Clare put her face up to be kissed and he held her off, his hands on her shoulders.

"Kind of pushing things a bit, aren't you, Clare?"

"What else did you expect? I told them right off. Pop'd have killed me if I hadn't."

"A girl's a fool to marry a man when he—when he doesn't want to get married. It's all wrong, Clare. You've got a right to somebody who's ready to settle down. You've got a right to be happy."

"I'm taking that chance," she told him. And because there was something pathetic about her determination he kissed her. She clung to him feverishly, instinctively holding to him as if by sheer contact to inflame him into desire for her. But a thousand other things were milling in his mind. Resentment at the loss of his freedom; the depth to which Kay must think he had sunk to take money from her; and mixed in with that his desire to escape from the house, to see the boys at the Martin House, even after his long abstinence to get a drink of hot burning liquor, and wash away memory and the damned stench of that stove and Clare's cheap perfume.

He loosened her hold on him.

"We'll have to open a door or something, Clare. I can't breathe."

She opened the door without a word and went across to her room. He thought at first that she had left him, and