Page:Mosquitos (Faulkner).pdf/153

 to where Thelma and Roy was, and pretty soon Pete came back. And that’s how I learned it.”

“Well, it sure sounds good. I wonder Say, let me say it sometimes, will you?”

“All right,” Jenny agreed. “You can have it. Say, what’s that you keep telling your aunt? something about pulling up the sheet or something?” The niece told her. “That sounds good, too,” Jenny said magnanimously.

“Does it? I tell you what: You let me use yours sometime, and you can take mine. How about it?”

“All right,” Jenny agreed again, “it’s a trade.”

Water lapped and whispered ceaselessly in the pale darkness. The curve of the low ceiling directly over the berth lent a faint sense of oppression to the cabin, but this sense of oppression faded out into the comparatively greater spaciousness of the room, of the darkness with a round orifice vaguely in the center of it. The moon was higher and the lower curve of the brass rim of the port was now a thin silver sickle, like a new moon.

Jenny moved again, turning against the other’s side, breathing ineffably across the niece’s face. The niece lay with Jenny’s passive nakedness against her arm, and moving her arm outward from the elbow she slowly stroked the back of her hand along the swell of Jenny’s flank. Slowly, back and forth, while Jenny lay supine and receptive as a cat. Slowly, back and forth and back “I like flesh,” the niece murmured. “Warm and smooth. Wish I’d lived in Rome oiled gladiators Jenny,” she said abruptly, “are you a virgin?”

“Of course I am,” Jenny answered immediately in a startled tone. She lay for a moment in lax astonishment. “I mean,” she said, “I—yes. I mean, yes, of course I am.” She