erforming some complicated technical process
which he knows to be beyond the powers of most other people, and she had
a feeling that he was not thinking of her at all. That was absurd, of
course, for he was holding her in his arms, and whispering her name over
and over again, and pressing his mouth down on hers, and she told
herself that she was being tiresome and pernickety like the worst kind
of grown-up, and urged herself to lend him a hand in this business of
love-making. But she could not help noticing that these were the poorest
kisses he had ever given her. Each one was separate, and all were
impotent to constrain the mind to thoughts of love; between them she
found herself thinking clearly of such irrelevancies as the bare,
bright-coloured, inordinate order of the room and the excessive view of
tides and flatlands behind the polished window-panes. The kisses had
their beauty, of course, for it was Richard who was giving them, but it
was the perishing and trivial beauty of cut flowers, whereas those that
he gave her commonly had been strongly and enduringly beautiful like
trees.

Always when he took her in his arms and she lifted her mouth to his it
was like going into a wood, or, rather, creating a wood. For at first
there was darkness, since one closed one's eyes when one kissed as when
one prayed; and then it seemed as if at each kiss they were being a
tree, for their bodies were pressed close together like a tree-trunk,
and their trembling, gripping arms were like branches, and their faces
where love lived on their lips were like the core of foliage where the
birds nest. She would see springing up in the darkness around her the
grove of the trees that their kisses had created: the silver birches
that were their delicate, unclinging kisses; the sturdy elms that were
their kisses when they loved robustly and thought of a home together;
the white-boled beeches with foliage of green fire that they were when
they loved most intensely. But to-day they did not seem to be making
anything; he was simply moving his lips over her skin as a doctor moves
his stethoscope over his patient's chest. And, like the doctor, he
sometimes hurt her. She hated it when he kissed her throat, and was glad
when he thought of something he wanted to say and stopped.

"Next time I go to London," he said, "I'm going to buy you a jade
necklace, or malachite if I can get it. The green will look so good
against your white, white skin."

"Th