Night was fully come and the car squatted at the curb in patient silhouette; the negro driver sat within with all the windows closed. Within its friendly familiarity Mrs. Maurier’s spirits rose again. She gave Mr. Talliaferro her hand, sugaring her voice again with a decayed coquetry.
“You will call me, then? But don’t promise: I know how completely your time is taken up—” she leaned forward, tapping him on the cheek—“Don Juan!”
He laughed deprecatingly, with pleasure. The niece from her corner said:
“Good evening, Mr. Tarver.”
Mr. Talliaferro stood slightly inclined from the hips, frozen. He closed his eyes like a dog awaiting the fall of the stick, while time passed and passed . . . he opened his eyes again, after how long he knew not. But Mrs. Maurier’s fingers were but leaving his cheek and the niece was invisible in her corner: a bodiless evil. Then he straightened up, feeling his cold entrails resume their proper place.
The car drew away and he watched it, thinking of the girl’s youngness, her hard clean youngness, with fear and a troubling unhappy desire like an old sorrow. Were children really like dogs? Could they penetrate one’s concealment, know one instinctively?
Mrs. Maurier settled back comfortably. “Mr. Talliaferro is perfectly terrible with women,” she informed her niece.
“I bet he is,” the niece agreed, “perfectly terrible.”
4
Mr. Talliaferro had been married while quite young by a rather plainfaced girl whom he was trying to seduce. But now, at thirty-eight, he was a widower these eight years. He had been the final result of some rather casual biological research
