Page:To-morrow Morning (1927).pdf/227

 each other, aching for each other savagely, her body yielding to his passionately and exultantly, aching for more pain, not for tenderness, quivering and alive, going past feeling to inexpressible completeness.

"Evelyn! We should have died!"

The waves withdrew, sounding faint and far, turning into the rain, the wind in wet leaves. The unbearable beauty of white radiance flowed into darkness, depth beneath depth of gentle darkness.

Effa thought she heard her sick puppy crying, so she put on her old blanket wrapper and took the lamp down to the woodshed to see how he was. He welcomed her with a feeble flop of his tail; his sad eyes looked dimly and imploringly at her; his nose pushed into her hand. She huddled there with the heavy silky body across her knees. She could smell the wet lilacs outside the shed; they made her chest feel queer, as if something was stuck there. She wanted, she wanted! She didn't know what she wanted. Yes, she did, too: she wanted a fellow, and much chance she had of ever getting one, with her fat clumsy body and homely face, always cutting up and making a joke of herself first, before other people could. She wanted a fellow to look at her the way Joe Green looked at that girl. And she'd live and die an old maid, "more fun than a circus." Tears ran down her red face and into her wide-stretched mouth, bitter as drops from the depths of the sea.