He tried to put his clumsy hand upon her breast, but the feeling of shame and profanation swept over him and he could not keep it there. He put his hand upon her knee, and thrust it under the skirt: the warm flesh of her leg stung him like an electric shock and he jerked his hand away. And all the time the girl did nothing, made no attempt to resist or push him away, just yielded with a dumb sullen passiveness to his embraces, her face smouldering with a slow sullen passion that he could not fathom or define. He did not know why she had wakened him, why she had called his name, what meaning, what emotion lay behind her brooding look, her dumb and sullen passiveness, whether she yielded herself willingly to him or not.
He did not know why he should have this sense of shame and guilt and profanation when he touched her. It may have come from an intrinsic nobility and grandeur in her person and in her character that made physical familiarity almost unthinkable; it may even have come in part from a feeling of social and class inferiority—a feeling which may be base and shameful, but to which young men are fiercely sensitive—the feeling which all Americans know and have felt cruelly, even those who scornfully deny that it exists and yet have themselves done most to foster it. Certainly he had at times been bitterly conscious of the girl’s “exclusiveness”—the fact that she was a member of “an old Boston family”—a wealthy, guarded, and powerfully entrenched group; he knew that a beautiful and desirable woman like Ann would have had many opportunities to pick and choose among wealthy men of her own class, and that he himself was just the son of a working-man.
But, most of all, he knew that, more than anything else, the thing that checked him now, that overpowered him with its loveliness, that filled his heart with longing and impossible desire, and at the same moment kept him from possession—was the passionate and bitter enigma of that strange and lovely thing which had shaped itself into his life and could never be lost, could never be forgotten, and was never to be known: the thing he knew by these two words—“New England.”
And as the knowledge came to him he felt the greatest love and hatred for this thing that he had ever known. A kind of wild cursing anger, a choking expletive of frustration and despair possessed him. He took her by the arms and jerked her to her feet, and cursed her bitterly. And she came dumbly, passively, sullenly as before, neither yielding
