She thrilled deliciously at the thought.
She was really a woman, with a man ripe to ask for her in marriage.
It was a lure to all that was fundamental in her sex.
The fabric of her life, of all that constituted her, quivered and grew tremulous.
The thought fluttered in her mind like a flame-attracted moth.
She went so far as to imagine Martin proposing, herself putting the words into his mouth; and she rehearsed her refusal, tempering it with kindness and exhorting him to true and noble manhood.
And especially he must stop smoking cigarettes.
She would make a point of that.
But no, she must not let him speak at all.
She could stop him, and she had told her mother that she would.
All flushed and burning, she regretfully dismissed the conjured situation.
Her first proposal would have to be deferred to a more propitious time and a more eligible suitor.
CHAPTER XXI
Came a beautiful fall day, warm and languid, palpitant with the hush of the changing season, a California Indian summer day, with hazy sun and wandering wisps of breeze that did not stir the slumber of the air.
Filmy purple mists, that were not vapors but fabrics woven of color, hid in the recesses of the hills.
San Francisco lay like a blur of smoke upon her heights.
The intervening bay was a dull sheen of molten metal, whereon sailing craft lay motionless or drifted with the lazy tide.
Far Tamalpais, barely seen in the silver haze, bulked hugely by the Golden Gate, the latter a pale gold pathway under the westering sun.
Beyond, the Pacific, dim and vast, was raising on its sky-line tumbled cloud-masses that swept landward, giving warning of the first blustering breath of winter.
The erasure of summer was at hand.
Yet summer lingered, fading and fainting among her hills, deepening the purple of her valleys, spinning a shroud of haze from waning powers and sated raptures, dying with the calm content of having lived and lived well.
And among the hills, on their favorite knoll, Martin and Ruth sat side by side, their heads bent over the same pages, he reading aloud from the love-sonnets of the woman who had loved Browning as it is given to few men to be loved.
But the reading languished.
The spell of passing beauty all about them was too strong.
The golden year was dying as it had lived, a beautiful and unrepentant voluptuary, and reminiscent rapture and content freighted heavily the air.
It entered into them, dreamy and languorous, weakening the fibres of resolution, suffusing the face of morality, or of judgment, with haze and purple mist.
Martin felt tender and melting, and from time to time warm glows passed over him.
His head was very near to hers, and when wandering phantoms of breeze stirred her hair so that it touched his face, the printed pages swam before his eyes.
"I don’t believe you know a word of what you are reading," she said once when he had lost his place.
He looked at her with burning eyes, and was on the verge of becoming awkward, when a retort came to his lips.
"I don’t believe you know either.
What was the last sonnet about?"
"I don’t know," she laughed frankly. "I’ve already forgotten.
Don’t let us read any more.
The day is too beautiful."
"It will be our last in the hills for some time," he announced gravely. "There’s a storm gathering out there on the sea-rim."
The book slipped from his hands to the ground, and they sat idly and silently, gazing out over the dreamy bay with eyes that dreamed and did not see.
Ruth glanced sidewise at his neck.
She did not lean toward him.
She was drawn by some force outside of herself and stronger than gravitation, strong as destiny.
It was only an inch to lean, and it was accomplished without volition on her part.
Her shoulder touched his as lightly as a butterfly touches a flower, and just as lightly was the counter-pressure.
She felt his shoulder press hers, and a tremor run through him.
Then was the time for her to draw back.
But she had become an automaton.
Her actions had passed beyond the control of her will-she never thought of control or will in the delicious madness that was upon her.
His arm began to steal behind her and around her.
She waited its slow progress in a torment of delight.
She waited, she knew not for what, panting, with dry, burning lips, a leaping pulse, and a fever of expectancy in all her blood.
The girdling arm lifted higher and drew her toward him, drew her slowly and caressingly.