Hudson River Bracketed · Book I · Chapter 5 (2/2)

Upton got up and stretched his thin arms above his head. “Well, I’m going to get a move on toward bed. It was about 150 in that fernhouse this afternoon.” He groped his way between them, and went into the hall, banging the screen door after him in the instinctive defence against mosquitoes. From where Vance lay in the hammock he could see Upton put the chain across the front door, and bolt it.

Suddenly, close to him in the darkness, he heard Laura Lou say: “You’ve had that old lilac in your buttonhole all day. It smells all faded.” She bent above him and snatched it out of his coat. Instinctively he put up his hand to prevent her; his poem had made the withered blossom sacred. “Oh, don’t⁠—” But his hand, instead of the lilac, caught her soft fingers. They quivered, frightened yet entreating, and the warmth of her touch rushed through him, tempting, persuading; but she was no more than a little girl, awkward and ignorant, and he was under her mother’s roof. Besides, if it had not been for the heat and the darkness, and his mood of sensuous lassitude, he did not believe that even the touch of her soft skin would have roused him; the raw flapper had no charm for his unripe senses.

“Here⁠—give it back! Listen to me, Laura Lou!” But she sprang out of reach with one of her maddening giggles, and he let her hand go, and the lilac with it, indifferently.

Upton came clumping back to the porch. “Going up to bed too?” he asked. Vance assented and tumbled out of the hammock. “All right. Then I’ll put the lamp out. Come along, Laura Lou.” To Vance he added: “Mother left a candle on the upper landing,” and he reached up to the swinging lamp, pulled it down, and filled the passage with the stench of its extinction. Laura Lou had already slipped up ahead of them to her mother’s room.