as possible. “Ive been told I have a figure like Dorothy Mackaill’s, only not too thin. . . . I think a little flesh is becoming to a girl. Don’t you?”
“Devastating,” the other agreed again. She rose and held a dark colored dress between her hands. “You'll look worse than ever in this . . . terrible as a young widow.” . . . She went to Jenny and held the dress against her, contemplative; then still holding the dress between her hands she put her arms around Jenny. “A little flesh is worse than a little dynamite, Jenny,” she said soberly, looking at Jenny with her dark, sad eyes. . . . “Does your hand still hurt?”
“Its all right now.” Jenny craned her neck, peering downward along her flank. “It’s a little long, ain’t it?”
“Yours will dry soon.” She raised Jenny’s face and kissed her on the mouth. “Slip it on, and well hang your things in the sun.”
four o’clock
He strode on in the dust, along the endless shimmering road between pines like fixed explosions on the afternoon. The afternoon was an endless unbearable brightness. Their shapeless, merged shadow moved on: two steps more and he would tread upon it and through it as he did the sparse shadows of pines, but it moved on just ahead of him between the faded forgotten ruts, keeping its distance effortlessly in the uneven dust. The dust was fine as powder and unbroken; only an occasional hoofprint, a fading ghost of a forgotten passage. Above, the metallic implacable sky resting upon his bowed neck and her lax, damp weight upon his back and her cheek against his neck, rubbing monotonously against it. Thin fire darted upon him constantly. He strode on.
The dusty road swam into his vision, passed beneath his feet and so behind like an endless ribbon. He found that his
