Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/143

Rh perienced a warm, breath-taking, generalized sort of attraction toward her that he would have repudiated indignantly as sex attraction, yet which was indubitably due neither to his aesthetic sense nor his appreciation of her sparkling conversation.

Indeed, after a dozen sentences the conversation rather lagged. They stared out to sea lulled by the ebb and flow of the, water and the slow wheeling of gulls. Kenneth dropped his hand to his side and unexpectedly found it in contact with Pearl's. Her hand was a good one, soft and pink, unroughened by coarse work. Kenneth experienced a sudden, pleasurable tingling shock; Pearl appeared to be quite unconscious of this contact. She did not withdraw her hand for some moments, during which Kenneth sat almost breathless. Then she raised it quite naturally to adjust her hair, and when that operation was finished, she dropped it in her lap. Had she noticed? and was she offended? Kenneth did not know.

The affair ran its usual course. Kenneth had been through such things before with "summer girls" in the East. But what differentiated this from all the others was the girl's puzzling personality. She was so very prim and stiff and precise in her movements, the choice of her phrases; had such strange inhibitions and conventions which she insisted on, and such a disregard of other conventions which Kenneth had heretofore looked upon as essential! Her very reticence added flavour to her concessions. It was like a scarlet lining to a nun's robe. Kenneth soon found that she did not particularly object to his holding her hand, in fact would as soon hold his hand in public except that it might make people laugh. She made more fuss about his arm about her waist, but after due and decent struggle permitted him to sit so. But she became truly indignant when he tried, to kiss her; and meant it.

"I'd like to know what kind of a girl you think I am!" she cried indignantly to the bewildered young man, whose simple creed saw absolutely no difference in kind between the one caress and the other. If a girl let you put your arm around her, surely she'd let you kiss her! "You must have a very low opinion of me! The idea!" and it took him some time to smooth her down.

But these bewildering inconsistencies certainly added zest