had already kissed her on several occasions and fancied that she was by no means indifferent to me. So I lingered and looked at the figure that was waiting for me as though it were some bright ghost. Not that there was anything fragile or ghostly in Bess's appearance. She was a well-made girl, slim certainly, but not weak. She would laugh and joke with the men in the bar, showing no embarrassment at what might be said, except for that embarrassment which is conventionally affected. Yet, at other times, and particularly when we were alone, she would adopt a different manner. Her head would be drooping, her eyes slide away from mine, or, when our eyes met, there would be a mistiness in her gaze, a withdrawal into some other world that attracted me, but attracted me to something other than herself. So that seeing her afterwards in the company of others she would appear to me for a moment as a stranger, and then in a moment or two it would be that other vision of her that would be strange to me. With uncertainty, then, as to what I should see when I saw her, I now loitered and from some distance admired the light green dress she was wearing and her yellow hair swinging about her neck. She saw me and waved her hand. The gesture was both timid and inviting. Her face appeared flat to me, delicate as I knew her features to be, so that it was something tall and swaying that I saw, green growing out of the ground, then white, and then gold flowing into the air. I felt my heart beating quickly and a contraction of the muscles in my stomach. I smiled like a dog smiles and said: "I hope I'm not late." She ran a few steps towards me and touched with her fingers the cuff of my jacket. "No, no," she said, "it's me that's early." Her face seemed to me as soft as petals, with the widely set and somewhat narrow eyes liquid and swimming and drowning me. I held her wrist gently and bent forward to kiss her, but she turned her head aside, looking suddenly like a small child, and said: "Oh no, really. Look at all the people." Then we both smiled. I was feeling slightly sick, and we began to walk together among the tents and booths. I felt that, as we walked, people turned their heads to look at us, although in point of fact this was not the case; my feeling of sickness passed and I was suffused with a sense of pride, but not of confidence. By a coconut-shy Bess clapped her hands and jumped, tugging at my elbow. "Oh let's have a throw!" she cried, and I paid sixpence for her and then watched her as with a kind of gracious clumsiness she attempted to aim at the coconuts. Even had she hit one, there was so little force behind her arm that she would not, I think, have dislodged it from its pedestal; but she threw so inaccurately that the wooden balls either hit the ground a few feet in front of her or else sailed far above the row of coconuts into the hands of a boy who was waiting at the back of the tent to collect them. "Oh I did so want one," she said, looking at me with an expression in which there was some real as well as some assumed dejection. "It's easy," I said, knowing that I was good at this kind of activity. I paid my money and had soon dislodged four coconuts, being so absorbed in this pursuit that I hardly noticed Bess's screams of delight as the brown hairy things toppled over or spun sideways across the tent. "Would you like any more?" I said, when I had exhausted my ammunition and the stall-keeper had piled up the four prizes in front of me, congratulating me at the same time upon my marksmanship. "Oh no, that's plenty," Bess said. "Besides we can't carry any more." And they were, indeed, I found, somewhat difficult to carry. We began to walk farther through the crowds. "I think you're wonderful," Bess said, and squeezed my arm. I, too, began to think that I had accomplished something remarkable, but as I looked down at her shoulder and her arm beside me I again began to feel sick and my knees trembled. I pressed the coconuts hard
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