Explore "Lavinia" by Rhoda Broughton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"Even thus two friends condemned Embrace and kiss and take a thousand leaves, Loather a hundred times to part than die; Yet now farewell, and farewell Life with thee. "
They look at each other in a sort of terror, with a renewal and immense increase of that fear of their own and each others' possibilities of frailty, which, looked back upon now, is seen to have been so inadequately weak and so abundantly justified. Since there is no longer any barrier of innocence between them, what is there to hinder them from a repetition -- a hundred repetitions -- of that tasted, and therefore now senselessly abstained-from, ecstasy? What more of guilt can there be in ten or twenty score kisses than in that one which they have drunkenly given and taken? They see the sophistry dawning in one another's hungry eyes; and once again their rebel arms half reach out reciprocally across a dwindled interval; but this time, to balance her former misleading of him, salvation -- if that bitter abstinence can be called so -- comes from her that at first was weakest. She tears her eyes away from him, and snatches a look round, as in preparation for flight.