Read After the Fireworks for Free Online

all due respect.” He smiled again, “And ‘punctured’—that was really the mot juste. I shall steal it and use it as my own.”
    â€œPermesso.” This time it was a spotted muslin and brown arms and a whiff of synthetic carnations.
    â€œI think we’re rather in the way,” said Pamela, who was becoming more and more uncomfortably aware of being conspicuous. And the spirit presences of Miss Huss, of Aunt Edith, of the two American ladies at Florence seemed to hang about her, hauntingly. “Perhaps we’d better . . . I mean . . .” And turning, she almost ran to the door.
    â€œPunctured, punctured,” repeated his pursuing voice behind her. “Punctured with the shame of being warm-blooded mammals. Like those poor lank creatures that were standing at the counter in there,” he added, coming abreast with her, as they stepped over the threshold into the heat and glare. “Did you see them? So pathetic. But, oh dear!” he shook his head. “Oh dear, oh dear!”
    She looked up at him and Fanning saw in her face a new expression, an expression of mischief and laughing malice and youthful impertinence. Even her breasts he now noticed with an amused appreciation, even her breasts were impertinent. Small, but beneath the pale blue stuff of her dress, pointed, firm, almost comically insistent. No ashamed deflation here.
    â€œPathetic,” she mockingly echoed, “but, oh dear, how horrible, how disgusting! Because they are disgusting,” she added defiantly, in answer to his look of humorous protest. Here in the sunlight and with the noise of the town isolating her from every one except Fanning, she had lost her embarrassment and her sense of guilt. The spiritual presence had evaporated. Pamela was annoyed with herself for having felt so uncomfortable among those awful old English cats at Cook’s. She thought of her mother; her mother had never been embarrassed, or at any rate she had always managed to turn her embarrassment into something else. Which was what Pamela was doing now. “Really disgusting,” she almost truculently insisted. She was reasserting herself, she was taking a revenge.
    â€œYou’re very ruthless to the poor old things,” said Fanning. “So worthy in spite of their mangy dimness, so obviously good.”
    â€œI hate goodness,” said Pamela with decision, speeding the parting ghosts of Miss Huss and Aunt Edith and the two ladies from Boston.
    Fanning laughed aloud. “Ah, if only we all had the courage to say so, like you, my child!” And with a familiar affectionate gesture, as though she were indeed a child and he had known her from the cradle, he dropped a hand on her shoulder. “To say so and to act up to our beliefs. As you do, I’m sure.” And he gave the slim hard little shoulder a pat. “A world without goodness—it’d be Paradise.”
    They walked some steps in silence. His hand lay heavy and strong on her shoulder, and a strange warmth that was somehow intenser than the warmth of mere flesh and blood seemed to radiate through her whole body. Her heart quickened its beating; an anxiety oppressed her lungs; her very mind was as though breathless.
    â€œPutting his hand on my shoulder like that!” she was thinking. “It would have been cheek if some one else . . .Perhaps I ought to have been angry, perhaps . . .” No, that would have been silly. “It’s silly to take things like that too seriously, as though one were Aunt Edith.” But meanwhile his hand lay heavy on her shoulder, broodingly hot, its weight, its warmth insistently present in her consciousness.
    She remembered characters in his books. Her namesake Pamela in Pastures New. Pamela the cold, but for that very reason an experimenter with passion; cold and therefore dangerous, full of power, fatal. Was she like Pamela? She had often thought so. But more recently she had often