The girl found her aunt near the spot where the Antinöus stands on its pedestal, and walked along by her side, neither speaking nor listening to the elder lady's remarks on the objects they passed. They did not seem to her to be worth listening to. She knew that for her aunt art had reached its _comble_ on the day when the late Sir Noël Paton had affixed his signature to "The Man with the Muckrake," and she had got out of the way of trying to explain that much water had flowed under London Bridge and many students flowed through the McGrath since that time. Besides, she did not want to talk. She wanted this last high hour in the Louvre as much as might be to herself. She wanted to taste the full emotion of it, not even analysing it, if only for once analysis would cry a truce. At the end of the gallery they turned and walked back again.
It was as they passed the Antinöus for the second time that the girl felt her young bosom rise almost painfully. She could not have told why, without premeditation, she suddenly lingered, so that her aunt passed a little ahead. She watched her disappear behind some plinth or pedestal or other, and then stopped opposite the marble bust.
There was no knowing when she might find herself in this wonderful place again, and it seemed to her that her farewell of it now required some symbol. She gave a furtive glance round. Neither visitor nor _gardien_ was to be seen, and again something seemed to rise in her throat. Noiselessly she stole to the pedestal. For a moment she wondered whether she dared; the next instant she had risen,--in her low-heeled brown shoes she was hardly more than five feet high,--she had risen on tiptoe.
She crushed her lips against the Antinöus's marble cheek.
What it was she really kissed she had no idea. They say that male artists have been known to kiss the pallid mask of the Girl said to have been found in the Seine, but probably they have kissed, not the senseless plaster, but some more glowing inner image. But the girl thought of no young man, Greek and dead or modern and alive. Perhaps by her act she set young men expressly aside, adoring the imperishable expression instead. It was the first kiss she had ever given. There was no sex-impulse in it, and yet it was a gesture of sex. She would not have known what other gesture to employ.
