Waltz Into Darkness

7

Arriving home from his office — this was about a week later, ten days at most — he hastened up the stairs to greet her, not having found her in any of the lower-floor rooms when he entered. He was cushioning his tread, to surprise her, to come up unexpectedly behind her and cover her eyes, have her guess who it was. Though how could she fail to know it was he, for who else should it be? But homecoming was still an exquisite novelty, it had to be decked out with all these flourishes and fancies; though it was repeated daily, it still held all the delightful anticipation of a first meeting, each time.

The door of their room was open and she was seated in there, docilely enough, in a fan-backed chair, only the top of her head visible above it, for she was looking away from the entrance. He stood for a moment at the threshold, still undiscovered, caressing her with his eyes. As he watched he could see her hand move, limply turning over the page of some book that was occupying her.

He started over toward her, intent now on bending suddenly down over the back of the chair and pressing his lips to the top of her head, coppery-gilt in the waning sunlight. But as he advanced, and as her hidden form slowly came into view, lengthening into perspective with his own approach, something he saw made him stop again, amazed, almost incredulous.

He changed his purpose now. Moved openly, in a wide circle about the chair, to take it in from the side, and stopped at last before it, with a sort of pained puzzlement discernable on his face.

She had looked up at discovery of him, closed her book with a little throaty exclamation of pleasure.

“Here you are, dear? I didn’t hear you come in below.”

“Julia,” he said, in a tone of blank incomprehension.

“What is it?”

He described her form with a sketchy lengthwise gesture of his hand, and still she didn’t understand. He had to put it into words.

“Why, the way you’re sitting—”

Her legs were crossed, as only men crossed theirs. One knee reared atop the other in unashamed prominence, the shank of her leg boldly thrust forth, the suspended foot had even been swinging a little, though that had stopped now.

The sheath of her skirt veiled the full rakishness of the position, but shadowy outlines and indentations outlined it only too distinctly even so.

She had been caught in a very real grossness, not to be understood by any later standard of manners, but only when set against its own contemporary code of universal conduct. For a woman to sit like that would have drawn stares anywhere, then, even ostracism and a request that she leave forthwith. No woman, not even the flightiest, sat but with the knees both level and the feet both flat upon the floor, though one might be drawn back behind the other for added grace. Immorality lies not in the nature of an act itself, but in the universality of the accepted tenet which it flouts. Thus a trifling variation of posture can be more shocking, to one era of strictly-maintained behavior, than a very real transgression would be to another and more lax one. The one cannot understand the other, and finds it only a laughable prissiness. Which it was not at the time.

Durand was no more prudish than the next, but he saw something which he had never seen any other woman do. Not even the “young ladies” of Madame Rachel’s “Academy,” when he visited there during his bachelor days. And this was the wife under his own roof.

“Do you sit that way at other times too?” he queried uneasily.

Subtly, with a sort of dissembling stealth, the offending knees uncoupled, the projecting leg descended beside its mate. Almost without the alteration being detected, she was once more sitting as all ladies sat. Even alone, even before only their own husbands.

“No,” she protested virtuously, tipping horrified palms. “Of course not. How should I? I... I was alone in the room, and it must have come about without my thinking.”

“But think if it should come about, some time, without your thinking, where others could see you.”

“It shan’t,” she promised, tipping horrified palms at the very thought. “For it never did before, and it never will again.”

She dismissed the subject by elevating her face toward him expectantly.

“You haven’t kissed me yet.”

The incident died out in his eyes, to match its extinction in his mind, in the finding of her lips with his.