In these first slanting years, in her furnished flat of upright, mandolin-attachment piano, nude plaster-of-Paris Bacchante holding a cluster of pink-glass incandescent grapes, divan mountainous with scented pillows, she was about as obvious as a gilt slipper that has started to rub, or a woman’s kiss that is beery and leaves a red imprint.

To Nicholas Turkletaub, whose adolescence had been languid and who had never known a woman with a fling, a perfume, or a moue (there had been only a common-sense-heeled co-ed of his law-school days and the rather plump little sister-in-law of Leo’s), the dawn of Josie cleft open something in his consciousness, releasing maddened perceptions that stung his eyeballs.  He sat in the imitation cheap frailty of her apartment like a young bull with threads of red in his eyeballs, his head, not unpoetic with its shag of black hair, lowered as if to bash at the impotence of the thing she aroused in him.

Also, a curious thing had happened to Josie.  Something so jaded in her that she thought it long dead, was stirring sappily, as if with springtime.

Maybe it was a resurgence of sense of power after months of terror that the years had done for her.

At any rate, it was something strangely and deeply sweet.

“Nicky-boy,” she said, sitting on the couch with her back against the wall, her legs out horizontally and clapping her rubbed gilt slippers together—­“Nicky-boy must go home ten o’clock to-night.  Josie-girl tired.”

Her mouth, like a red paper rose that had been crushed there, was always bunched to baby talk.

“Come here,” he said, and jerked her so that the breath jumped.

“Won’t,” she said, and came.

His male prowess was enormous to him.  He could bend her back almost double with a kiss, and did.  His first kisses that he spent wildly.  He could have carried her off like Persephone’s bull, and wanted to, so swift his mood.  His flare for life and for her leaped out like a flame, and something precious that had hardly survived sixteen seemed to stir in the early grave of her heart.

“Oh, Nicky-boy!  Nicky-boy!” she said, and he caught that she was yearning over him.

“Don’t say it in down curves like that.  Say it up.  Up.”

She didn’t get this, but, with the half-fearful tail of her eye for the clock, let him hold her quiescent, while the relentlessly sliding moments ticked against her unease.

“I’m jealous of every hour you lived before I met you.”

“Big-bad-eat-Josie-up-boy!”

“I want to kiss your eyes until they go in deep—­through you—­I don’t know—­until they hurt—­deep—­I—­want—­to hurt you—­”

“Oh!  Oh!  Josie scared!”

“You’re like one of those orange Angora kittens.  Yellow.  Soft.  Deep.”

“I Nicky’s pussy.”

“I can see myself in your eyes.  Shut me up in them.”

“Josie so tired.”