“ ‘Oh, but it’s delightful, isn’t it?’ she said to me. ‘I picked that fabric for the draperies myself. I’ve done so many things. Small things. Big things. I cut those roses from the back garden. I laid out the rose garden. There was no rose garden before I came. You want to see the rose garden?’

“A faint protest voiced itself in my mind that there was no rose garden on Blackwood Farm, that the rose garden was long gone for the swimming pool, but this seemed incomprehensible and unimportant, and to have mentioned such a thing seemed rude.

“I turned to tell her I couldn’t hold off of kissing her, and I bent down and closed my mouth over hers. Ah. I never in my dreams felt that. I never tasted that. I never knew that. I felt the heat of her body through her clothes. It was so intense, I almost came. I put my arms around her and lifted her, and I put my knee against her skirts and pushed against her sex, and I put my tongue into her mouth.

“When she drew back, it took all my self-control to let her put her hand firmly on my chest. ‘Light the lamps for me, Quinn,’ she said. ‘You know, the oil lamps. Light them. And then I’ll make you the happiest young man there ever was.’

“ ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. I knew right where they were. We always kept oil lamps at Blackwood Manor because, being out in the country like we were, we never knew when the electricity was going to go out, and so I found the oil lamp in the sideboard and I lifted it up and put it on the dining table. I raised the glass shade and lighted the wick with the cigarette lighter I always carried just for such things.

“ ‘Put it on the window, darling,’ she said, ‘yes, right there, on the sill, and let’s go into the parlor and light the lamp there too.’

“I did what she told me, putting the lamp onto the windowsill. ‘But that looks dangerous,’ I said, ‘with it under the lace panels and so near to the draperies.’

“ ‘Don’t you worry, darling,’ she said. She led me briskly across the hallway and into the parlor. I took the lamp out of the high Chinese chest between the two hall doorways. After it was lighted, I put it on the windowsill in the same manner as I had done across the hall. Now, that harp, that harp was the same, the big gold harp, I thought, but everything else was changed.

“This was the strangest dizziness. I didn’t dare to think of having her, of her finding out that I didn’t know how.