“How old are you?” he wanted to know. “No, don’t tell me—you might be any age. Yesterday, you might have been eighteen. To-night, you are twenty-five—at least that. By gad, I like a girl to vary!”
Somehow in the darkness his hand found hers. It was moist, hot; the sensation was very disagreeable; but Joy did not take hers away. She could not think quickly about anything at all—
“You—I never met anyone like you.” His voice was coming hurried, breathless; there was something in the contact of her hand that utterly changed the tone of it. “You—you’re ripping me all to pieces to-night!”
Before she could realize what was happening, he had his arms around her and had pressed her to him in the moist, warm darkness. She knew he was searching for her lips.
Joy closed her eyes in the palpitant blackness; his kiss would be mysterious, wonderful.
But when it came, it was neither mysterious nor wonderful. Cold with the shock, she tried to wrench herself free from the hideous reality of the thing; but he was holding her so tightly that she was powerless to move. She gasped for breath to speak, but he pressed her to him more closely than ever, and kissed her again and again.
When he finally released her, her breath was coming in painful sobs. “What’s the matter?” he said thickly. “Don’t you like me any more?”
She tried to cover her face there in the dark, to hide the shattering of her idol; but his hands caught hers and held them away so that he could find her lips again. In all her sheltered life, Joy had never known what it was to be afraid. But now she felt a chill, bewildering fear. She was absolutely helpless. Something her father had once said, came back to her as she gasped there in the darkness: “A girl should never be where the situation does not protect her.” She was where the situation protected her. All around there were others—within good hearing distance.
“If you don’t let me go,” she panted, “I shall scream so that everyone can hear——”
His grasp relaxed for a moment and she pulled herself free and ran away from him through the darkness—down the way that they had come, past the glowing cigarette ends, and gay little murmurs of conversation, until she came to the door and light. There she did not stop to take breath, but fled on up the stairs.