It was as if he had seen the sun fall out of the sky, or had seen worshipped purity polluted.
Then he realized the significance of it, and his heart began pounding and challenging him to play the lover with this woman who was not a spirit from other worlds but a mere woman with lips a cherry could stain.

He trembled at the audacity of his thought; but all his soul was singing, and reason, in a triumphant paean, assured him he was right.

Something of this change in him must have reached her, for she paused from her reading, looked up at him, and smiled.

His eyes dropped from her blue eyes to her lips, and the sight of the stain maddened him.

His arms all but flashed out to her and around her, in the way of his old careless life.