" He looked round him uneasily,
and I had the rare--oh, the queer!--impression of the very first symptom I had
seen in him of the approach of immediate fear. It was as if he were suddenly
afraid of me--which struck me indeed as perhaps the best thing to make him.
Yet in the very pang of the effort I felt it vain to try sternness,
and I heard myself the next instant so gentle as to be almost grotesque.
"You want so to go out again?"
"Awfully!" He smiled at me heroically, and the touching little
bravery of it was enhanced by his actually flushing with pain.
He had picked up his hat, which he had brought in, and stood
twirling it in a way that gave me, even as I was just nearly
reaching port, a perverse horror of what I was doing.
To do it in ANY way was an act of violence, for what did
it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness
and guilt on a small helpless creature who had been for me
a revelation of the possibilities of beautiful intercourse?
Wasn't it base to create for a being so exquisite a mere
alien awkwardness? I suppose I now read into our situation
a clearness it couldn't have had at the time, for I seem to see
our poor eyes already lighted with some spark of a prevision
of the anguish that was to come. So we circled about,
with terrors and scruples, like fighters not daring to close.
But it was for each other we feared! That kept us a little
longer suspended and unbruised.
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