or rubbed the heavy contours of their thighs against his legs; they looked at him with moist red lips through which their wet red tongues lolled wickedly, and they sat upon the front rows of the class in garments cut with too extreme a style of provocation and indecency, staring up at him with eyes of round lewd innocence, cocking their legs with a shameless and unwitting air, so that they exposed the banded silken ruffle of their garters and the ripe heavy flesh of their underlegs.
Thus, to all his weariness of mind, the terror and torment of his spirit, a thousand erotic images of an aroused but baffled and maddened sensuality were added: they swarmed around him like the embodiment of all the frustrate hunger, desire, and fury he had come to know in the city, with a terrible wordless evocation of men starving in the heart of a great plantation, of men dying of thirst within sight of a shining spring, with a damnable mockery, a nightmare vision of proud, potent and hermetic flesh, of voluptuous forms in hell, for ever near, for ever palpable, but never to be known, owned, or touched.
The girls, the proud and potent Jewesses with their amber flesh, schooled to a goal of marriage, skilled in all the teasings of erotic trickery, with their lustful caution and their hot virginity pressed in around him in a drowning sensual tide: with looks of vacant innocence and with swift counter-glances of dark mockery, they pressed upon him, breathing, soft and warm and full, as they cajoled, teased, seduced with look or gesture, questioned trivially, aggressively, uselessly—those with a body, and no mind, intent alone upon seduction, spurred on perhaps by some belief that promotion and reward in all the business of life could best be got at in this way; and those with minds and bodies both intent upon some painful mixture of sharp protest, struggle, and seduction which made erotic musings in their soul:
“Oh, but I don’t—ag-gree with you at aw-ull! That’s not the meaning that I saw in it, at aw-ull! I think you’re being very supe-er-fish-al. I don’t ag-gree with you at aw-ull!”—the rich voices, aggrieved, injured, hen-like and sensual, omened with deep undernotes of ripe hysteria, rose and fell with undulant duckings of yolky protest—the rich sensual voices of the Jewesses receiving, giving, returning and withdrawing, rose and fell in curved undulance of yolky hen-clucking protest, with omens of a ripe hysteria. Receiving, clucking, and protesting with their warm hen-feathered cries, they seemed to say, “Oh, come and take me, break me, but I don’t ag-ree with you at aw-ull; Cluck-cluck-cluck-cluck-
