and the primal attraction of the elemental man is not for the woman. Fundamentally, it is just for woman. And here was Woman, the whole race of woman, beautiful, bewitching, compulsive.
An odor began to float in from the kitchenette, an odor that was not of coffee and cakes, nor of grease upon the top of a range in a dirty little restaurant. It was savory and fragrant, and it filled his nostrils. It reminded him of all the appetizing meals he had ever eaten. It made him hungry with all the hungers he had ever known; his brain was reeling; he was going to faint,—and with mere appetite. Yet the appetite was not for food.
With a kind of shock he recognized the nature of his appetite. The shock passed; but the hunger remained. John felt that he himself was somehow changed. He was not the Chairman of the Prayer Meeting Committee of the Christian Endeavor Society, not a Deacon of the grand old First Church. He was instead the man that the Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell feared for and prayed for. He was the man whose heavy ridged brows had indicated to the shrewd old actor a nature packed full of racial dynamite.
And Woman was fulminating the dynamite. Deliberately—or recklessly—or innocently; but none the less surely. Her lips were pliant. Her form was plastic. The smouldering light in the eyes, the lashes drooping lazily, the witchery of a dark tress which coiled upon the white soft shoulder, all combined in the appeal of physical charm. To this, Woman added the subtle, maddening witchery of silence,—breathing, watchful, waiting quiet.
This silence continued until it became oppressive, explosive even.
Would she not speak? He could not. Would she not move? He dared not.
