"
"Well," she said, "if you _have_ to come after somebody--"
"True." I asked her if she was giving me her reasons.
"Yes, if you want them. _I_ don't. I'm content to love out of all
reason."
And she did. She loved extravagantly, unintelligibly, out of all
reason; yet irrefutably. To the end. There's a sort of reason in that,
isn't there? She had the sad logic of her passions.
She got up and gathered herself together in her sombre, violent beauty
and in its glittering sheath, her red fox skins, all her savage
splendour, leaving a scent of crushed orris root in the warmth of her
lair.
Well, she managed to hold him, tight, for a year, fairly intact. I
can't for the life of me imagine how she could have cared for the
fellow, with his face all dried and frayed with make-up. There was
something lithe and sinuous about him that may, of course, have
appealed to her. And I can understand his infatuation. He was decadent,
exhausted; and there would be moments when he found her primitive
violence stimulating, before it wore him out.
They kept up the _menage_ for two astounding years.
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