John, staring at her, got a sudden intuitive gleam of a woman who was not only ambitious as he was ambitious, but wildly, dangerously ambitious, with a danger that was not to herself alone, but to any who stood near enough to be trampled on as she climbed upward,--dangerous to one who might love her, for example!
He got the thought clearly in his mind, too; yet only for a moment, and to be crowded out immediately by another thought, or indeed, a succession of thoughts, all induced by the picture she made amid her cushions.
How beautiful she was! How very, very beautiful! And how magnetic! How she had made the blood run in his veins when she lay upon his breast as Lygia, their hearts beating, their souls stirring together!
And now she had resigned herself for an hour to his company, had given him her confidence, was awaiting, as it seemed, his pleasure,--while the color came and went in her cheeks, while subdued lights danced in the dark pools beneath lazily drooping lashes, and the filmy gown which sheathed her body stirred with every breath as if a part of her very self.
Lying there like this, her presence ceased soon to induce thoughts and began to stimulate impulses. Hampstead longed to reach out and lay a hand upon her. She was so alluring and so, so helpless.
For weeks now he had allowed himself to dream of her as possibly the woman of his destiny,--not admitting it, but still dreaming it. Here in his presence, she suddenly ceased to be even a woman. She was just Woman; and the primal attraction of the elemental man is not for the woman. Fundamentally, it is just for woman. And here was Woman, the whole race of woman, beautiful, bewitching, compulsive.
An odor began to float in from the kitchenette, an odor that was not of coffee and cakes, nor of grease upon the top of a range in a dirty little restaurant. It was savory and fragrant, and it filled his nostrils. It reminded him of all the appetizing meals he had ever eaten. It made him hungry with all the hungers he had ever known; his brain was reeling; he was going to faint,--and with mere appetite. Yet the appetite was not for food.
With a kind of shock he recognized the nature of his appetite. The shock passed; but the hunger remained. John felt that he himself was somehow changed. He was not the Chairman of the Prayer Meeting Committee of the Christian Endeavor Society, not a Deacon of the grand old First Church. He was instead the man that the Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell feared for and prayed for. He was the man whose heavy ridged brows had indicated to the shrewd old actor a nature packed full of racial dynamite.