"Give you what" I asked.
She stamped her foot.
"Un baiser!" she said, with a little French scream. "Embrasse moi!
Stupide!"
I laughed slightly as I looked down upon her. It seemed so
ludicrous, the proposition, just then to me. I had hardly lived the
life I had in Paris for the last thirty months, to now, in the
moment of success and freedom, mar its remembrance by even so much
as a chance kiss to a cafe chantant girl.
For a second we looked at each other. I noted the tint and the curl
of the offered lips, damp with cosmetic, and suggestive of past
kisses, and the untouched lips of Lucia seemed almost against my own
as I looked. Then I loosened her hand, which clung to my sleeve, and
turned from her, and went on down the path. She shrieked some vile
French words after me, and sent the five-franc piece rolling after
me down the gravel slope.
I laughed and shrugged my shoulders without looking back, and went
on out of the gardens down into the now silent streets. What a flood
of good spirits poured through my frame as I passed on! I hardly
seemed to walk. The buoyant, almost intolerable, unbearable sense of
elation within me seemed pressing me forward without volition.
The incident just passed, the woman's hand on mine, the woman's
words, though from her they were nothing to me, had yet touched and
unlocked those impulses which, until now, had been so sternly
repressed, barred down, sepulchred and sealed.
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