AT FORTY Pierre was still a very handsome man, whose successes with women, and the long and now broken liaison with Elena, had given the local people much to talk about in the small country place where he had settled. He was now married to a very delicate and charming woman, but two years after their marriage her health had grown poor and she was a semi-invalid. Pierre had loved her ardently, and his passion at first seemed to revive her but slowly had become a danger to her weak heart. Finally her doctor advised against all lovemaking, and poor Sylvia entered into a long period of chastity. Pierre, too, was suddenly deprived of his sexual life.

Sylvia was naturally forbidden to have children, and so she and Pierre finally decided to adopt two from the village orphanage. It was a great day for Sylvia, and she dressed lavishly for the occasion. It was a great day for the orphanage, too, because all the children knew that Pierre and his wife had a beautiful house, a big estate, and that they were reputed to be kind.

It was Sylvia who chose the children—John, a delicate fair-haired boy, and Martha, a dark and vivid girl, both about sixteen years of age. The two had been inseparable in the orphanage, as close as a brother and sister.

They were taken to the big, lovely house, where each was given a room overlooking the wide park. Pierre and Sylvia gave them all their care and tenderness and guidance. In addition, John watched over Martha.

At times Pierre observed them with envy of their youth and comradeship. John was fond of wrestling with Martha. For a long time she was the stronger. But one day while Pierre watched them, it was John who pinned Martha down to the ground and managed to sit on her chest and cry out his triumph. Pierre then noticed that the victory, following a heated mingling of their two bodies, did not displease Martha. There is the woman beginning to form herself already, he thought. She wants the man to be stronger.

But if the woman was appearing timidly now in the young girl, she obtained no gallant treatment from John. He seemed intent on treating her only as a playmate, even as a boy. He never complimented her, never noticed the way she dressed or her coquetries. In fact, he went out of his way to be harsh with her when she threatened to be tender, and to call attention to her defects. He treated her without sentimentality. And poor Martha was perplexed and hurt but refused to show it. Pierre was the only one aware of this wounded femininity in Martha.

He was lonely on the big estate. He had the care of the farm adjoining it, of other properties owned by Sylvia throughout the country, but it was not enough. He had no companion. John dominated Martha so completely that she would pay no attention to him. At the same time, with the experienced eye of the older man, he could see very well that Martha was in need of another kind of relationship.

One day when he found Martha crying and alone in the park, he ventured to say tenderly, “What is the matter, Martha? You can always confide to a father what you can’t confide to a playmate.”

She looked up at him, for the first time aware of his gentleness and sympathy. She confessed that John had said she was ugly and awkward and too animal.

“What a stupid boy,” said Pierre, “that is absolutely untrue. He says that because he is too much of a girl and can’t appreciate your type of healthy and vigorous beauty. He is a sissy, really, and you are wonderfully strong and beautiful in a way he cannot understand.”

Martha looked at him with gratitude.

Henceforth it was Pierre who greeted her every morning with some charming phrase—”That blue color suits your skin so well” or “That is a very becoming way of wearing your hair.”

He surprised her with gifts of perfume and scarves and other little vanities. Sylvia never left her bedroom now, and only occasionally sat in a chair in the garden on exceptional, sunny days. John was becoming absorbed in scientific studies and had been giving less attention to Martha.

Pierre had a car in which he did all the errands for the supervision of the farm. He had always gone alone. Now he began to take Martha with him.

She was seventeen, beautifully formed by a healthy life, with a clear skin and brilliant black hair. Her eyes were fiery and ardent and rested lingeringly upon the slender body of John—too often, thought Pierre as he watched her. Obviously she was in love with John, but John did not notice it. Pierre felt a pang of jealousy. He looked at himself in the mirror and compared himself with John. The comparison was rather in his favor, for if John was a handsome youth, at the same time there was a coldness in his appearance, whereas Pierre’s green eyes were still compelling to women, and his body exuded great warmth and charm.

Subtly he began his courtship of Martha, with compliments and attentiveness, becoming her confidant in all matters, until she even confessed her attraction to John, but added, “He is absolutely inhuman.”

One day John insulted her openly in Pierre’s presence. She had been dancing and running, and looking exuberant and alive. Suddenly John looked at her reproachfully and said, “What an animal you are. You will never sublimate your energy.”

Sublimation! So that was what he wanted. He wanted to take Martha into his world of studies and theories and researches, to deny the flame in her. Martha looked at him angrily.

Nature was working in favor of Pierre’s humanness. The summer made Martha languid, the summer undressed her. Wearing fewer clothes, she was becoming more and more aware of her own body. The breeze seemed to touch her skin like a hand. At night she tossed in bed with a restlessness she could not understand. Her hair was unbraided, and she felt as if a hand had loosened it around her throat and were touching it.

Pierre was quick to sense what was happening to her. He made no advances. When he helped her out of the car his hand rested on her fresh bare arm. Or when she was sad and talking about John’s indifference, he would caress her hair. But his eyes rested on her and knew every bit of her body, whatever he could divine through the dress. He knew how fine the down was over her skin, how free of hair her legs were, how firm her young breasts were. Her hair, wild and thick, often brushed against his face when she leaned over to study the farm reports with him. Her breath often mingled with his. Once he let his hand stray around her waist, paternally. She did not move away. Somehow his gestures answered deeply her need of warmth. She thought that she was yielding to an enveloping, paternal warmth, and gradually it was she who sought to stand near him when they were together, it was she who put his arm around her when they were driving, it was she who rested her head on his shoulder late afternoons on their way home.

They returned from these supervising trips always glowing with a secret understanding, which John observed. It made him even more sullen. But now Martha was in open rebellion against him. The more reserved and severe he became with her, the more she wanted to assert the fire in her, her love of life and movement. She flung herself into the comradeship with Pierre.

About an hour’s drive away, there was an abandoned farm they had once rented out. It had fallen into disuse, and now Pierre decided he wanted to have it repaired for the day John married. Before calling in the workmen, he and Martha went together to look it over and see what needed to be done.

It was a very big one-story house. A mass of ivy had almost completely smothered it, covering the windows with a natural curtain, darkening the interior. Pierre and Martha opened a window. They found much dust, the furniture musty and a few rooms ruined where the rain had come in. But one room was nearly intact. It was the master bedroom. A big, somber bed, many draperies, mirrors and a worn carpet gave it, in the semidarkness, a certain grandeur. Over the bed a heavy velvet cover had been thrown.

Pierre, looking around with the eye of an architect, sat on the edge of the bed. Martha stood near him. The summer warmth came into the room in waves, stirring their blood. Again Martha felt this invisible hand caressing her. It did not seem strange to her that a real hand should suddenly be slipping among her clothes, with the same gentleness and softness as the summer wind, touching her skin. It seemed natural and pleasant; she closed her eyes.

Pierre drew her body towards him and stretched her on the bed. She kept her eyes closed. This seemed merely like the continuation of a dream. Lying alone for many summer nights, she had been expecting this hand, and it was doing all that she had expected. It was stealing softly through her clothes, stripping her of them as if they were a light skin to be peeled, setting free the real, warm skin. The hand moved all over her, to places she had not even known it would go, to secret places, which were throbbing.

Then suddenly she opened her eyes. She saw the face of Pierre right over her face preparing to kiss her. She sat up brusquely. While her eyes were closed she had imagined it was John who was stealing thus into her flesh. But when she saw Pierre’s face, she was disappointed. She escaped from him. They returned home silent, but not angry. Martha was like a drugged person. She could not rid herself of the sensation of Pierre’s hand on her body. Pierre was tender, and seemed to understand her resistance. They found John rigid and sullen.

Martha was unable to sleep. Every time she dozed off she began to feel the hand again, to await its movements, as it came up her leg and worked its way to the secret place where she had felt a throbbing, an expectancy. She got up and stood by the window. Her whole body was crying out for this hand to touch her again, it was worse than hunger or thirst, this yearning of the flesh.

The next day she rose pale and determined. As soon as lunch was over, she turned to Pierre and said, “We have to see about that farm today?” He assented. They drove off. It was a relief. The wind struck her face and she was free now. She watched his right hand on the wheel of the car—a beautiful hand, youthful, supple, and tender. Suddenly she leaned over and pressed her lips on it. Pierre smiled at her with such a gratitude and joy that it made her heart leap to see it.

Together they walked through the tangled garden, up the moss-covered path, into the green dark room with its curtains of ivy. Straight to the large bed they walked, and it was Martha who stretched herself on it.

“Your hands,” she murmured, “oh, your hands, Pierre. I felt them all night.”

How suavely, how gently his hands began to search her body, as if he were searching for the place where her sensations were gathered and did not know whether it was around her breasts, or under her breasts, along her hips or in the valley between the hips. He waited for her flesh to respond, perceiving by the slightest tremor that his hand had touched the place she wanted to be touched. Her dresses, sheets, nightgowns, the water of her bath, the wind, the heat, everything had conspired to sensitize her skin until this hand fulfilled the caresses they all had given her, adding warmth and the power to penetrate the secret places everywhere.

But as soon as Pierre leaned over too close to her face to take a kiss, then the image of John interfered. She closed her eyes, and Pierre felt her body also closing against him. So with wisdom, he pursued his caresses no further.

When they returned home that day, Martha was filled with a kind of drunkenness that made her behave recklessly. The house was so arranged that Pierre and Sylvia’s apartment was connected to Martha’s room, and hers in turn communicated with the bathroom used by John. When the children were younger all the doors were left open. Now Pierre’s wife preferred to lock her bedroom door, and the one between Martha and Pierre was also locked. On this day Martha took a bath. Lying quietly in the water she could hear John’s movements in his room. Her body was in a great fever from Pierre’s caresses, but she still desired John. She wanted to make one more attempt to awaken John’s desire, to force him into the open, so she would know whether or not there was any hope of his loving her.

Once bathed, she wrapped herself in a long white kimono, with her long thick black hair hanging loose. Instead of returning to her own room she entered John’s. He was startled by the sight of her. She explained her presence by saying, “I am terribly anxious, John, I need your advice. I’m leaving this house soon.”

“Leaving?”

“Yes,” said Martha. “It is time I leave. I must learn to become independent. I want to go to Paris.”

“But you are so needed here.”

“Needed?”

“You are my father’s companion,” he said bitterly.

Could it be that he was jealous? Martha waited breathlessly for him to say more. Then she added, “I should be meeting people and trying to get married. I cannot be a burden forever.”

“Married?”

Then he saw Martha as a woman for the first time. He had always considered her a child. What he saw was a voluptuous body, clearly outlined in the kimono, moist hair, a fevered face, a soft mouth. She waited. The expectancy in her was so intense that her hands fell to her sides, and the kimono opened and revealed her completely naked body.

Then John saw that she wanted him, that she was offering herself, but instead of being stirred, he recoiled. “Martha! Oh, Martha!” he said, “what an animal you are, you are truly the daughter of a whore. Yes, in the orphanage everybody said it, that you were the daughter of a whore.”

Martha’s blood rushed to her face. “And you,” she said, “you are impotent, a monk, you’re like a woman, you’re not a man. Your father is a man.”

And she rushed out of his room.

Now the image of John ceased to torment her. She wanted to efface it from her body and her blood. It was she who waited that night for everyone to fall asleep so she could unlock the door to Pierre’s room, and it was she who came to his bed, silently offering her now cool and abandoned body to him.