It was over now. Phil had stolen silently from the room, as his mother, her legs locked about his father's hips, fell back in the throes of their simultaneous emission. It had been marvelous to watch, the boy thought-and he had been unaware of the least pang of genuine jealousy.
Unappeased, his young member stiff and throbbing, he was naked upon his own bed a half hour later-not able to sleep, harassed with visions and longings. He was entertaining the idea of masturbating.
Then the door opened and his mother walked into the room. No need to masturbate now, he thought. His mother had come to sooth his ache.
BOOK I
-INCEST ORGY AT PALM BEACH
CHAPTER ONE
"But I tell you, father, there's a lot of gossip among all these idle nitwits-and a fellow can't be expected to stand it when the subject of the whisperings and nudging is his mother. She seems to have been so very, well, indiscreet with some of the men. Seems to me it's up to you to call a halt."
The older man shrugged helplessly at the ruffled lad who confronted him in a secluded comer of a patio of the great Palm Beach hotel.
"What can I do?" he asked. "I guess I started wrong with your dear and pretty mother. You are sixteen, now, Phil-getting to be a man-and I can be franker with you than when you were a child.
"You must be able to recall that your mother has always had, shall we say, the upper hand of me. I'm easy going-hate a row-and there never was a time when I couldn't have had a row simply by crossing her in any little matter."
"But it was never like this," observed the curly-haired youth, staring. "I know that mother always sort of had her way at home'. But she was always sedate enough-very reserved and even fussy in a social way-a sort of society light at Germantown.
"I've heard Aunt Sue Gilman say that they called her Miss Prim at Bryn Mawr. But here I come down from school to find her with a reputation for cutting up and ... and all that. I can't understand-why, I overheard two fellows talking back of some shrubbery during the dance last night and one of them wanted to know who that little beauty with the red gold hair was. Good heavens, father, think of having to hear your own mother called a little beauty with red gold hair."
"Well, more offensive remarks than that have been heard by affectionate sons, I imagine," said the Judge, with a trace of a smile.
"Yes-but what I mean-" went on Phillip, "the second man said: 'She's a wife and, I understand, a mother also-so there may be nothing doing in your line."
"And the first guy threw a fit and swore he didn't believe she was over twenty-two. Can you beat that for a son having to listen to...!"
"Still I can't say that I think you have quoted any comments which would offend your mother deeply," smiled Judge Brower. "Cutting a full dozen years from a woman's real age-and doing so with obvious sincerity is no crime in most of the States of this country."
"But," persisted the boy, "he went on to say that he had seen her on the beach several times and had thought her perhaps a young college girl and that she was the niftiest thing in the scantiest bathing suits to be seen anywhere about and that she was as white as milk and her body very lovely and-here's the worst thing, Father-"
Phillip lowered his voice and looked around for possible eavesdroppers.
"He said that he had first seen her the other day in red bathing trunks so loose that when she sat on the sand a fellow could look up the legs and see part of her bare behind-and that one of her titties was almost out already as she sat there sunning herself. He said that it was so beautiful that he had followed her into the surf and that there it had come entirely out and he had seen the nipple and everything quite naked and that, although he was hardly a yard away, she had left it like that for a full minute before she seemed to notice it and to cover it up again.
"I thought some of rushing from in back of the palms and taking a swing at him, but then I realized that that would only cause scandal."
Judge Brower sighed and, thoughtlessly perhaps, revealed a knowledge of Mrs. Brower's recent temperamental activities deeper than that of their son.
"I-I've known of-of a few episodes indicating a sort of let-down in your mother's--er-discretion," he said, with a little cough which may have accounted for his flush.
"One or two favored cavaliers have, I believe, had the privilege of taking her far off from the assembled crowd, disappearing with her in secluded spots along the shore for baths together. Swimming lessons, I believe they have been called, although your lovely mother already swims quite nicely.
"Then too, she has gone down from our suite once or twice lately on moon-lighted midnights to bathe with a crew who call themselves the Beach Combers, two or there young married pairs of flighty tendencies and half a dozen gilded roisterers of both sexes who are unmarried as yet.
"There have been, I am informed--er-peculiar tales of the informality of these Beach Comber gatherings at night-about-inn-nakedness and all that when they get a bit lighted up from the beverages they take along with them."
"But great God, father, how can you possibly keep on standing for such things. I'd rough house her-mother or no mother!"
His father's teeth showed for an instant in a sickly smile.
"You mean-you'd use actual violence?" he queried, with a touch of admiration in his voice. "But Phil-she's a woman-a particularly charming and beautiful woman.
"One cannot manhandle a woman-and especially if she chances to be one's wife or mother. Besides, it would be the easiest matter in the world to stir up a fearful scandal in that way. And then, too, I've always been too easy-going as I've already admitted.
"And also, this is a delicate subject to touch upon, but you're getting toward manhood and might as well comprehend-there are what most persons would think excuses for your mother's sudden going on a rampage so alien to her previous decorousness of conduct.
"I shouldn't unveil secrets of the--er-alcove to her own son. But, Phil, your sweet mother has always had a temperament in conjugal retirement which is peculiarly ardent. My efforts to-um-keep her fairly well contented and pacified in this direction have played their part in--er-sapping my vitality somewhat. So that I'm practically a total loss now, as I expect you schoolboys would say.
"The result is that-as she has truthfully complained many a time of late-when she most needs me, I am simply not there. I hope you comprehend-it's a very embarrassing topic-but you must have read things and been told things."
. The boy's attractive face was as red as that of his sire.
"Yes, I get you, dad," he said. "But, gracious heavens, you can't turn my pretty mother loose to run around with people who have no morals whatever-like this fast set who come to Palm Beach for the winter!
"Evidently, from what you say, she is not herself these days-practically irresponsible some of the time-and some brute of that rascally bunch might-what the boys at Lawrenceville call 'roll her' at any time.
"Maybe that's why she goes off alone in her bathing suit with this, that or the other fellow. God I'd like to catch her lying down with a man!"
"Hardly a filial wish, I fear she might think," said the Judge, clearing his throat nervously. "However, I think you are exaggerating our, um, problems, laddie.
"I doubt whether, with her patrician blood and native fastidiousness, she could be brought to surrender that marvelous jewel of a body of hers to the embrace of any man outside of wedlock.
"I think she'd prefer to suffer-with what alleviation of her sensuality she may glean from what we may as well admit to be tremendous indiscretions.
"And here enters a psychological point-I think you've studied psychology somewhat-from which I've taken what comfort I could in these past weeks since we preceded you down here to Florida.
"You see, Phil-or, rather, you probably don't see, but I am telling you-in every normal woman, especially those possessing considerable physical attractions, there is the soul of an exhibitionist. In other words, little indecent exposures-usually casually and apparently unwittingly offered-to unauthorized male eyes secretly delight a girl or woman.
"For they bring her the thrill of knowing she is exciting a masculine desire for her person-and from that thrill to imagining even greater surrenders which would bring her herself great physical raptures is a short step for a licentious mind-and the imaginings are likely to cause her almost as intense pleasure as would the actual experience.
"Even so fastidious a woman as your mother-who is, I may tell you, bodily ten years younger than her thirty-four years, despite the birth of you and your sisters-may, if inclined to a lechery which no longer has a normal outlet, find it keenly exciting to excite men without actually gratifying them to the full.
"And this, I am confident, explains the loose legged bathing drawers up whose legs male bathers are permitted to peer while sitting near her on the sand. It explains the bathing suits, abounding in color but parsimonious in material, which draw men in her direction.
"It explains the fact that accidents are likely to happen to her suit in the water, as in the case of which that man was speaking when you overheard him.
"Now-as for more serious infractions of the decencies when her senses are speaking loudly-I must confess that I think it quite probable that in these midnight baths with these frivolous if blue-blooded young persons-and I pledge you my word that your beautiful mother looks younger, without being in the least painted, than any of these flapper debutantes or young wives who go with that Beach Comber set-I must confess, I say, that I have no doubt she consents to strip herself of her suit and go into the water stark naked in the moonlight-as, it is said, is the frequent practice of this gang.
"And, boy, she'd be the queen of them all, which wouldn't interfere in the least with the perverse pleasure of her senses. She would love to see how all the nude youths kept their eyes fixed upon her person and to see what happened to their flesh in consequence...."
"You mean, they'd get quite stiff; their things...?" muttered the boy. His face was scarlet as he heard his sire's discourse.
The Judge-graying already at forty-eight, but still a fine looking man-nodded, without looking up.
"I'll bet she handles them then," said the lad mutinously. His normally pleasant mouth was drawn into a line. "I'd handle her if I caught her. I'd teach her," he threatened. "A fellow's mother doing such a thing as that-and maybe they are allowed to handle her too!"
"Don't excite yourself uselessly, Phil," suggested his father. "I've been needing a confidante, I find-though, heaven knows, her own son is hardly the proper person-still, since you were already somewhat apprised, it is better for you to get the straight of it.
"No, I doubt whether anyone is permitted to play libidinously with her in these mixed bathing parties. I think she would content herself with queening it in this improper style-and getting the young men immensely stirred up. Of course ... "
He fingered his heavy hair feebly, almost apologetically.
"Of course I don't know how it may be when she disappears in the daytime with some isolated male partner. If they bathe naked together then, especially when she is greatly agitated, there may be regrettable scenes out of sight of everybody else."
"She might even lie down for him on the sand and let him lie on her," whispered Phillip hoarsely.
"Not that-oh, no-I'll not believe that," interjected the Judge, waving a dismayed hand. "You ought to know what her pride of blood is-she never forgets she is a Warren-and the yoking of her flesh with that of a lover-no-I'll not credit that!"
"God almighty!" cried the boy practically. "How much of a step can it be from playing about all naked with a man to letting him do whatever else he chooses!
"I've never had any experiences which amount to anything in these lines, to be sure, but it stands to reason! What I can't possibly understand is how you seem to have taken all this lying down.
"You're her husband-and I'm just her son-but I swear to God I'd have had a finger in the pie before this-and long before this!"
"You have a streak of firmness-inherited from her, no doubt-which, I'm sorry to say, is lacking, sadly lacking in me," almost pleaded Judge Brower. "I've been used to letting her sway me ever since we were married-as you couldn't have failed to realize.
"And all this came along so gradually-and while I was still almost ashamed of having failed her in a fleshly, virile way-that I've just sort of fiddled around and declined to believe things until they were forced upon me. I couldn't face the thought of a scene if it could possibly be avoided.
"And I've hoped she would come to her senses when she considered her family and its repute. If you had been here-for you're the only one she'd ever listen to as against her own will or decision.
"I've often secretly admired the way in which you could stand up to her-and often have your own way-against a woman so determined. But, of course, in so delicate a matter as this, a son can have no standing-and shouldn't even have any knowledge.
"I-I've suffered, of course," went on Judge Brower, clearing his throat and apparently determined now to make a clean breast of all that he knew of the sudden wildness and the quasi-infidelity of this upstanding boy's mother.
"I've even sat by her side upon the sand, when she was in street attire and when I, having seen her dress a few minutes earlier, knew that of such an article as drawers or bloomers her legs were guiltless, and seen her legs lightly cocked up and men gathering-pretending to come for a chat, but always sitting as nearly in front of her as they could get-to enjoy the indiscretion of the beautiful Mrs. Brower.
"She, having neglected to clothe her thighs and secrecies at all beneath her gown on this warm day, had forgotten that fact and was now making a luscious spectacle of herself. It's happened several times and....
As a certain grimness indicative of determination came over his son's youthful countenance, the Judge broke off in some alarm.
"Of course, if you should try to-to reason with your dear mother," he said, "you wouldn't--er-drag me into it-as the source of information or complaint, I mean."
"No dad, certainly not," muttered Phillip, almost pityingly. "But you can make up your mind about one thing. I've got Warren blood in my veins too, and there's going to be a great reformation in our family.
"If the sweetest, finest but most willful mother in the world has gone coo coo-that's no reason for taking it lying down. We'll see which is the harder headed, she or I, when we get the bit between our teeth."
CHAPTER TWO
Phillip Brower, down from Lawrenceville for a fortnight's vacation with the family, who were spending the winter at Palm Beach, had turned down with some reluctance an invitation to go with school mates to Canada for winter sports.
A youthful athlete of much merit and promise, he shone on gridiron and court and ice. He had been promised the honor of a chance to work out with the celebrated Wanderers on their own hockey rink if he should go north instead of south.
Now, however, he would not for worlds have been anywhere save where he was. Staggered though he was by his first conception of his young and beautiful mother as a woman-as a woman, too, with abundant passions which appeared to be finding uncanny outlets-he made up his mind to be very wily in his efforts as a corrective agency.
He would keep his eyes open, lurk about, make certain of his ground, and then, if he found his father's impressions true, if his patrician mother, her neglected femininity seething, was actually indulging in a sort of lascivious monomania for indecencies with a mixed crew of wealthy idlers, then he meant to do something effective about it all.
It never occurred to him to be ashamed of her. Just bewildered that his mother, the wife of Judge Brower, highly esteemed, highly placed and exceedingly wealthy, could care even to mingle at all with gilded riffraff, no matter if some of them did bear honored names.
If her recent actions had been accurately pictured she must, as his father had intimated, be under the influence of some morbid spell, from which, he promised himself with youthful grimness and determination, she should be shaken forth into sanity.
He had always, and with great reason, been hugely proud of his young mother, proud not only of the blood which she had transmitted to him, but likewise of her striking beauty, which made her the instant idol of his schoolmates when she visited him at Lawrenceville.
He had heard their bemused and envious comments with the proper air of casual indifference, yet he had been greatly pleased, as he always was when he saw startled eyes open wide and stare admiringly at his "mater."
He did not mean, now, to be ashamed of her. If, not herself, she had been betrayed by some peculiar human characteristics which he, as yet, vaguely understood but which impressed him as something sinister, into inclinations and actions worthy only of common persons, he meant to find a way to bring her to her senses.
He had never been, even in childhood, awed by or afraid of the charming Mrs. Marie Brower, as were her husband and her young daughters. He was always able to stand up to her more or less-and his sire, envious of this ability on the part of his son, was inclined to think this was the reason why Phil seemed to be her preferred of all the family.
If she pulled an unreasonable and childish tantrum on the boy, he had been won't to meet it with a sort of cool defiance until it subsided; and if, then, she melted into admiring affection and, saying that he was her own son and very like her and that she knew she had been just a bit too captious and cross with her boy, took him into her arms, Phillip would melt instantly himself.
With pride in his little victory-and sometimes he gained quite unreasonable triumphs, maternal love causing Marie to yield in matters where she had been right from the start-he would hug his lovely mother as she hugged him.
Their kisses would be warm and many. Several times in the past two years Judge Brower had raised bewildered eyebrows to see his wife suddenly push their son from her embrace and turn away, half blindly and gropingly, as if to regain self control.
There was a curious mixture of boy scout, Indian scout, detective and outraged son in the present attitude of Phil toward the crisis with which he meant to deal.
It would be a sort of game to stalk his mother and her new friends, to find out what she and they were doing to cause all these whisperings and pointing, to bring her to "be herself" again in case he found the rumors and his father's impressions well founded.
Although not particularly precocious sexually, he knew something theoretically about girls and their instincts to be provocative toward the other sex. Yet he found it very bewildering to think of his mother as caring a rap about men-outside their own family.
It was a kind of pedestal on which he had placed her in his own mind, and if she were in peril of toppling from that pedestal it was certainly his business, in view of his father's helplessness, to prevent her or to reestablish her.
His mother, like his young sisters, had received his advent joyously. Yet he had speedily found her nervous, distraught, prone to disappear from the family circle and to be found babbling with girls and with men of a rather loud variety on the broad verandas or in a patio-sipping drinks, rosier of cheek than of won't, no more decorous than the other young wives or maidens as regarded the elevation of her superb, silk clad calves or ankles on adjoining knee.
Rejoining her on such an occasion, his reception from her had shown just a touch of vexation which did not escape the boy. Yet, proud of this fine boy as he was of her, she had presently presented him to her companions to receive their incredulous outcries that she couldn't possibly have a child of this age with smiling pleas to the curly-headed youth to substantiate her statement.
Too young to drink, flirt or chatter idly and suggestively, Phillip had been far from at home in this circle, to which, nevertheless, he clung doggedly, not caring whether he should prove a damper on sport or not.
That the two or three sleek-haired men in the crowd would gladly have seen "this kid" go on his way to play about with those of his own age, was apparent even to the youth himself, for it certainly cramped their style to have a robust son of such a girlish and lovely mother on hand to listen to their little frivolities-frivolities which had to be kept under check because of the boy's ears and his gray eyes-so like those of Marie Brower.
Their vexation was so apparent that it drew smiles from Marie and even from the other youthful women ranged about her. Yet the sturdy boy was not without his partisans. They were feminine in sex-and they looked with admiration upon Phillip-announcing their envy of his mother.
The dark-haired and elfin Mrs. Leila Dunham, twenty years old, brazenly pouted a reproach at her blonde husband because he should "long ago have made a son like this one" for her. Roguishly she patted his hand-and then possessed herself of it-saying that, in view of his mother's apparent age, he couldn't be more than four and needed looking after.
A smiling stoic-keeping his head and finding banter in return, to his mother's evident pleasure, Phillip endured smoothing of his cheeks; presently, as the frolicsome girls became more pressing in their game of pretending him an infant, little dabs of kisses.
"I wish to play with this nice boy, he's more than seven," sang Betty McAlister, a fluffy headed, rather pallid, demi-vierge child of nineteen.
"Come live with me and be my love," she sang, tugging at the lad's hand. "Ask mother nicely, and then we'll go and play at keeping house in that clump of palms. I'm tired of these forward people anyhow-"
"He's too young to learn what Betty would teach him," remonstrated Thalia Martin, pretty, frivolous debutante child of a great New York corporation lawyer.
"I am very nice. I guard morals, including my own. Come with me, Phil dear. We'll play or bathe or whatever you like. We'll go far from these worldly persons and nobody will have to worry about either of us.
"Mayn't he come, Marie. I'm crazy about him-he's a doll and a darling-and I'll not retract a syllable-even if you do glare at me, John Breedon, just because we're engaged!"
Looking pertly at the slender, dark man of thirty whom she addressed, she bent and kissed Phil softly upon the lips.
"I'm young," she pouted, raising her head, "and I need a playmate of about my own age. I'm eighteen, Phil-but I'll be only twelve, if you like, with you-or I'll be thirty.
"One more nice kiss, baby-oh, oh-you kiss even better than John! I'd better not go with you after all, you look young, but I fancy you could be very naughty!"
"Thank God for these bushes which protect us from prying eyes!" breathed Marie Brower, flushing and laughing as the contagion of wishing to pet her son spread among the girls and young women.
"Little did I think that I'd ever see you girls acting worse than these hardened wretches of men. My Phillip, with the accent on the 'my,' if you don't mind, is sixteen if you wish to know.
"A very perilous age-and I think I'd better take him away myself-before he learns all kinds of horrors from you conscienceless beauties."
She arose-really uncomfortable about what was going on in spite of its aspect of playfulness, genuinely intending to return with Phil to the hotel-but, was promptly and mischievously pushed into the boy's lap.
"There, you've got him properly covered and protected now," giggled the aubum-haired, buxom Mrs. Laura Senter, while the others smiled meaningly as they saw Phillip hastily smooth down his mother's light surah skirt which had flown to unveil some inches of lovely bare thighs when she fell upon him.
"That's right, hang on to her," laughed Betty, as the boy involuntarily slipped his arms about the exquisite body which had been thrust upon him-as if to seclude his mother from all this ribald crew.
"Don't let her up until she pays the Palm Beach forfeit for freedom-which is a nice warm kiss."
Phillip-somewhat constrained now, although he had kept his presence of mind remarkably under the deluge of feminine attentions based upon his supposed childhood, was so unaware of what had happened to his person under the peculiarly clinging and torrid second kiss of the dark-eyed Thalia Martin that he wondered why his mother's half averted cheek had flamed suddenly as her soft, round, tenuously covered bottom snuggled down into his lap.
There was a pleasant sensation, he knew, a sensation which seemed to belong to this cuddling of his mother as if it were she who was the child. He saw a round breast, near his eyes, heave convulsively. There was a little wriggle of a nervous buttock against his person, and now Phillip knew that his concealed member was rigid and tense and that his warm burden was cognizant of the fact.
It was his turn to flush deeply-as his mother raised herself in his arms, removing herself from that indecent contact. Half standing, she veiled him-perhaps fearing that the flippant crowd might see what had happened to the lad and have no more respect for his innocent youth and their relationship than to comment suggestively.
"Don't let her up."
"Get the nice kiss she owes you," came the cries.
"Certainly I can kiss my son if I choose-and I do choose," observed Marie indignantly. "I'll blot out the none too seemly petting of you married and unmarried flappers with a real motherly caress."
Somewhat alarmed now-rather childishly, boyishly shy over any maternal effusion being lavished on him in public-Phil hastily arose.
"Here, oh, I say, mother ... he began.
But already he was in the round, bare, beautiful arms of the young woman. And she was putting a certain tenderness into her warm hug and kiss, as if in rebuke of the frivolous caresses he had had from her playmates-as if wishing to obliterate them from his mind and her own as if wishing to show this gilded, idle crew that, though she could play about indecorously at times with them, here was her chief interest in life-that, though she might look only twenty, she was the proud, loving mother of this big boy.
He topped her by half a head-this robust, football playing son of hers. They looked like a pair of youthful lovers-for, not accustomed to so fervid a demonstration of his mother's never-failing and "taken for granted" affection for him, Phillip had surmounted his own embarrassment in order not to embarrass her by declining to join in that embrace.
Their arms were about each other clingingly. Their lips were joined-more warmly and prolonged than ever before-for to Marie, her heart welling now with maternal affection and with just a touch of maternal jealousy, it seemed evident that no such brief, pecking kiss as she was in the habit of giving her boy would suffice to blot out the harum scarum kisses which he had had from others and to put the seal of her proprietorship upon him in the eyes of these others.
Yet the very warmth and prolongation of that embrace and that kiss served to cause eyes to light up about them and wee, hidden smiles to be exchanged.
The men of the party, rather silent since Phillip had joined them, were as interested now as the girls. Not thus, they seemed to say with little nudges and meaning glances, did mother and son salute each other-at least, in their experience.
The observers seemed forgotten, excluded. For, if the boy uneasily abstracted his lips from the lovely mouth which pressed them, his mother still clung to him, with her head fallen back and her eyes half closed.
She was sighing, her bosom turbulent. Her soft, adorably formed body involuntarily followed his loins as Phil sought momentarily to retreat from a pressure which was enhancing a turgid, mortifying condition-something which he felt abnormal under the circumstances.
As far as his loving mother was concerned, she was apparently alone-and, in her confused, agitated mind, for the first time-with a son who now revealed himself silently as "grown up."
She advanced her lips again-deliciously flushed now, a raving beauty, with languorous gray eyes filtering a soft light through long, fluttering lashes, with delicate lips quivering as they quested. She made all these othersvery attractive young females nevertheless-seem common by comparison.
The boy's eyes were wide open upon the beauty of her. And suddenly he clutched her almost brutally. Entirely submissive to a nervous, muscular arm tight as a fetter about her neck and another arm which bound her small waist, Marie cooingly rubbed her silken cheek against his-refusing her lips for an instant-then letting them be found and almost strangling him with arms about his neck.
It was the boy, the more self-conscious of the two, who first became aware of nervous whispers about them and of eager eyes and shimmering smiles. Releasing the body which had felt so glorious against his own, seeming almost to melt into his person, he detached his mother's arms almost roughly from about his neck, in spite of her dazed resistance.
There was awe of his strength, reproach for its exertion in her glance. Then, coming to herself slowly, she realized why he had ended their embrace-of whose duration she had only the vaguest notion.
She turned slowly, remaining in front of her son, shielding his person instinctively in guilty consciousness of the excitement which she had nourished in him.
"There, that will show all you flighty creatures how a whole mother's devotion can be symbolized in a single kiss; a sacred caress which you are all so accustomed to prostituting lightly that it could never mean anything genuine to you," she observed, rather falteringly.
Rather weak upon her shapely legs, she ventured now to sink into a chair-learning gratefully by a glance that Phillip had already managed to button the flaps of his rather long blue jacket over what she would not for a fortune have had these ribald scoffers observe.
Exclamations arose now breaking the tension which had existed.
"Single kiss!"
"Sacred caress!"
"Casually one might say that there was devotion in it, all right!"
"Oh," breathed the dark haired Leila Dunham. "You shall make me a child this very night, George. If it's a girl I shall drown it. If it's a boy, I shall divorce you-for I shall not need a husband any more."
Marie, almost quite herself by this time, waved a shapely hand disdainfully at the scoffers.
"Anything of fondness shown means nothing but fleshliness to you spoiled young loiterers," she said airily. "But you shan't put your evil concepts, even though you mean them for jokes, into the healthy mind of my lad.
"Run away and play at your silly games, Phil dear," she added, willfully making him seem a child of twelve by her mode of address.
The boy departed to engage another schoolboy in a set or two of tennis. But he was conscious of a strange new tenderness for his lovely mother who had unwittingly received the delicate, unwilling confidence of his aroused manhood and who had so tactfully concealed from these, her unworthy comrades, what it would have shamed him to have them observe.
More than ever he was intent upon "straightening her out"-upon bringing her full, beautiful womanhood to the fore in order to save her from a pathway whose gliding peril he dimly understood.
He would stop at nothing, he was decided, to fathom the extent of her yielding to indecorous impulses and to temptations to lower herself to the level of these rou's and flappers.
And-giving not a thought in his ignorance to the admission of his father that indulgences which are an imperative need to a healthy woman were lacking in the marital chamber-he meant to weld their family anew by restoring her, repentant for lax conduct, to the arms of his sire.
The duel which ensued, the clash of these two intense wills, resulted in a sort of modern Iliad of the winter resort pf the wealthy and powerful.
That a certain amount of attention should be drawn since the campaign of Phillip could not be carried on in privacy-was inevitable and it took tremendous determination on his part to go on in insistent revolt and attack against his mother's new proclivities.
It was first the sight of her settling down on the sand in daytime attire the morning following the experience just narrated that put him on the warpath.
She had rejoined Mrs. Laura Senter and Betty McAlister, who were already sunning themselves in fluffy clothing. Phil was twenty yards away and in his bathing suit, but already he could see that there was naked skin naughtily in sight above the stockings of the auburn haired, plump Laura, and that Betty's slim, pretty legs were carelessly cast also while two or three unknown male bathers were unostentatiously watching from near at hand.
Bare legs might be all right in bathing suits, reasoned this young censor but in street or walking or lounging robes certainly not. And Betty and the young married woman must see the eyes of those men fixed upon them so shouldn't they rearrange their poses decently?
He saw two men lounge up-exchange nods and greetings with the three girls-drop upon the sand with themacquaintances obviously. Still no move to hide the patches of nudity was apparent on the part of the chattering females-even though, as Phil could see, one of the men had leaned far over and, letting the sand trickle through his fingers, was casting lecherous eyes in search of what was still hidden.
The boy could not see, from his position, more than that his mother's delightful, silken clad calves were stretched decorously before her. But now he saw her raise one knee slightly-and become instantly the cynosure of intent masculine glances under cover of a rapid fire conversation.
Phil went in search of his father. It was his un-filial desire to learn how his mother was dressed underneath that very pretty gown.
"I saw her dress," admitted the Judge, when his son found him reading and smoking underneath a palmetto in a courtyard. "I never tire of seeing her dress or undress," he admitted further, no longer averse, since he had already gone so far, to making intimate confessions to Phillip, beyond the latter's age.
"She lets me do so, but there is always a certain contemptuous indifference in her attitude which chills me since I appear to have reached the stage of inability to content her physically.
"Nobody-no girl or woman anywhere-is lovelier to look upon than your mother. In the bath she is a marvel of snowy beauty and, as she arrays herself, so slowly and so scantily, I sometimes think I could-could do my duty toward her-if only she weren't so indifferent."
"But, but her clothing today?" insisted Phillip, conscious of a little stricture at the heart at these imaginative pictures of the mother whom he had held unforgettably in his arms only the day previous.
"I'm asking because ... well, she is sitting with a pair of flippant teasers on the sand there now, and...."
"And men are gathering, I suppose," said the Judge, shaking his head. "Don't I know what that is-haven't I sat by her side-by my own wife's side on the beach and been obliged to endure the knowledge that she was letting male eyes pasture on the most delicate and secret of her beauties?
"And, strangely, I have never in the past year felt so-so potent as when she has forced this humiliation upon me. It has served to whet me to a keenness-even though I was so bitterly shamed-and even though I myself could not at the time see what these male loungers were casually, carelessly, apparently unconsciously, permitted to view...."
"Then she is really-bare?" demanded Phillip, flaring. "As naked as your hand under that fluffy white skirt," said his sire. "She has on...."
He checked the articles on his fingers as he enumerated them.
"A one piece gown, a short chemise of lawn and lace, which hardly covers her hips, shoes and stockings, and that's quite all," averred Judge Brower.
"And you know how slight a movement-how almost decorous a posture-it takes, in so short a skirt, to make eyes free of a woman's body when she is sitting on the sand.
"Yes, your mother gets a thrill out of such an indecency as that. I've seen the color mount in her cheeks and her bosom heave just from exposing herself in that way."
"Well, she'll have something on pretty soon!" declared the boy, his face red and his eyes sparkling with ire. He arose from his chair as he spoke and started off.
"Don't you go to making scenes," cried his father in some alarm. "There'll be the very devil to pay-for you and myself both-and public scandals as well.
"She's so caught with her new vices-with the brazen frivolities of that gang she trots with-and she's so determined and self-willed! I've tried in vain to get her to go back north-thinking she would shake all this off if we were back at home. But she's living now just for all this necking and drinking and indecent bathing, for all this ribald crew...."
"She's going to live for her family!" vowed Phillip, his boyish voice vibrating with angry determination-not unmixed with a sort of jealousy.
His father sighed.
"But do be cautious if you try to reason with her, dear boy," he said.
"I don't know that I shall try to reason with her at all," remarked Phillip, departing.
CHAPTER THREE
"Oh, hello, laddie. How you do steal up on one, to be sure. Are you practicing to become a detective, by any chance?"
As she spoke, Marie Brower had let a raised round knee sink flatly to the level of its extended mate. She was flushed but smiling, and Phil, who had suddenly wormed his way almost discourteously amid the seated group of three girls and five men, gave her an unsmiling glance in return.
"Not exactly a detective today, just a messenger boy," he replied. "I've brought you something which you had forgotten. Here it is-I fancy you want it at once."
"But what in the world-I want nothing that I know of-" said his mother bewilderedly, as she took the tiny package which he handed over.
"Here, I think you all know my son, Phillip, all except you two gentlemen. Mr.-what are the names again, please-yes-Mr. Stone and Mr. Grayson-my oldest child and only son, gentlemen.
"One son is quite enough. Don't you know, Phil dear, that you are an almost indecent figure in a sedately clad gathering-with that big, muscular, white body of yours, so lavishly exposed. I'd no idea that I had produced so tremendous a creature."
Phil looked at her steadily, breathing hard. He had not been too late to catch sight of all the under surface of a beautiful, exquisitely formed and quite naked thigh as far as the lower curve of an equally nude buttock before his mother hastily rearranged her pose. There had been a slight scowl at him on the part of some of the vexed men-who had been eagerly if surreptitiously gratifying their hunter's instinct by trying futilely to see between the legs of this beauty as well as under them-an attempt which Marie had enjoyed foiling-playfully but "unconsciously."
Around about the newcomer-welcoming the boyish, attractive Phillip far more warmly than did his mother-the buxom and velvet skinned young Mrs. Senter, scornful now of these other eyes, was shamelessly giving of her best in the effort to tempt the handsome juvenile to lie at her feet and chat with her apart from these others.
Unseen of the rest, as Phil gave her a smile of recognition, she contrived, with moving, nervous legs, to let him see within inches of her nude crotch.
Her smooth brow pinkened under the auburn silk of her heavy hair. What a treat it would be to initiate this fine young neophyte, she was saying to herself!
She squeezed her full thighs, guiltless of attire beneath her brief skirt, together at the thought. In her big brown eyes was the languorous provocation of a glance which the boy was too young and inexperienced to read clearly.
But he smiled at her again, intent upon being courteous to these others, even if wroth with his beautiful mother. Her legs were finely formed, even if large, the ankles slender and indicative of race.
There was charming skin to be seen above the stockings-two or three inches of it-even now when her legs were lowered. Yes, beautiful legs, not so wonderful as his mother's, of course. But then, nobody could equal her in any respect.
The pallid, slender, fluffy haired Betty McAlister dared a yet greater audacity as the eyes of all these others were centred upon Marie Brower and the package which she hesitatingly held.
Betty played the modest virgin upon the boy. With long lashes lowered, she gave her short skirt a quick tug to try to make it cover her knees-but in the tugging process she raised it in both hands; and so high that Phil saw all the slender bare thighs of the girl and even, through the laces of a combination, the darkness of a curling little grove.
The boy was not unaffected by all these hospitalities which he understood so vaguely that he had no idea he was being sensually "courted" by these pretty New Yorkers. But his eyes were recalled to his mother, who was now, somewhat apprehensively, unrolling the bundle he had brought.
A single view of a comer of white muslin and creamy lace was sufficient to cause Marie Brower to utter an exclamation and hastily rewrap the package.
"You devilish boy!" she flounced at her son in an amused perplexity which merged into wrath as she realized the inner meaning of his nervy "message."
But the blonde George Dunham, beside her, had caught just a glimpse of what looked like an intimate garment rolled up. He caught at it-swung it out fully into the breeze as Marie shrieked. There was a universal laugh as a pair of richly decorated, short-legged little drawers appeared.
"My son's idea of a joke," clamored Marie, as she vainly battled to regain the garment which George held high in both his hands and allowed to swing freely in the sunlight.
"I, I mean he misunderstood. I intended to return this to the shop-and he thought I was going there from the beach..
"So!" cried Betty mischievously. "Well, to me it seems like a very strong hint from your boy that he thinks you have overlooked a portion of your attire in dressing this morning. If ever I knew a mother to get a strong, but silent scolding from her son!"
Marie was able to ignore this declaration in the straggle which arose for possession of her so intimate garment. Each of the men was determined to have the drawers as a trophy.
And the line plunging Phillip, indignant over this new profanation, entered the lists with a tremendous dive which knocked two of the men over and rescued the fragile garment miraculously intact.
"You take that back to the hotel and you put it where you found it and you keep out of my wardrobe hereafter," bade his mother, flushed and biting her lower lip nervously.
Feeling that, although repulsed with some loss in this preliminary skirmish, he had yet put over his point by shaming his lovely mother rather publicly, Phil departed. Behind him a babble of laughing voices arose.
"It's a cinch he meant to tell you to put on your pants," declared Laura Senter, gurgling with amusement.
"Beyond any doubt," agreed Betty. "He and I are modest-we belong really to a previous generation. I, I always-I mean usually-wear something besides a gown."
"As far as the gentlemen in the party are concerned," said the tall new acquaintance, Terry Grayson, "we had, of course no idea that the fair Mrs. Brower was otherwise than hermetically clad....
"You're a brazen fibber," proclaimed Betty. "Haven't I been watching your eyes whenever Marie so much as stirred a kneecap? And that's that, not that I blame you at all..
"Well, in hot weather how foolish to be prudish, when one is with friends. And who wouldn't wish to be a friend of Marie Brower?" demanded George.
"Curse your delicate minded son, Marie darling, for grabbing those drawers away from me. I meant to sleep with them under my pillow."
"Aren't we really entitled-as a sort of jury empowered to pass upon the grievances which this unbelievably robust and dictatorial son...." demanded the short and round faced Mr. Stone, with smiling suavity, "to observe the corpus delicto, so to speak?
"I think we should be allowed to verify whether the lad was correct in thinking such a garment lacking...."
"I dare you, Marie," urged George. "Nobody else is anywhere about. One quick flap upward-way upward, mind you-of that fluffy skirt and I'll set up the champagne for the crowd."
"Be game, dear," smiled Laura. "It's all in fun. And I'll vouch for Messrs Stone and Grayson as good, worthy pals-I've known them for days.
"And you know all the rest of us-and I'm very thirsty for that champagne."
But the beautiful ruling hoyden of Palm Beach chose now to be cold, stately and unsmiling in face of this racket of uncanny suggestion. It was intolerable to her to have been made ridiculous-as she felt that she had been made-before this crowd by Phillip's audacious, un-filial action.
She took leave of the circle presently-fully intending to have it out with the boy-to scold him warmly for what he had done and for the coldly critical attitude which had made it impossible to pass it off as just a kiddish, suggestive joke.
But she weakened-an unusual thing for this determined woman-as she trudged back to the hotel. She found herself suddenly smiling at the nerve of her handsome young son in practically telling his mother publicly to put on her drawers.
Maybe the Judge had been talking to the boy. In that case it was the Judge who should catch it! As for Phillip, she would tell him, once and for all, that it was not for a son to criticize or humiliate his mother-that if, in this torrid weather, she chose to go lightly clad, it was certainly nobody's business save her own-and that, if he chanced to think he had discovered a certain flimsiness of attire on her part, it was the role of a young gentleman not to notice it.
The five-room apartment appeared deserted as she entered it, but there was a rustling from the direction of her own room as she neared it. And Marie Brower stood petrified with amazement as she reached the door, which was lightly ajar.
For there stood her young son stripped of his bathing suit, freshly toweled, his fine body glowing, naked as the dawn-and-good heavens-trying on her lingerie, which lay scattered about him!
If there had ever been anything in the least effeminate about this stalwart youth of hers, Marie might not have been so completely overwhelmed with amazement. With back turned toward the door-and obviously confident that he had much time at his disposal before being interrupted-Phillip was just inserting a bare foot into the same pair of frail, pretty, short legged drawers which he had brazenly tried to prescribe for her.
The white shapeliness, the rippling muscles of the nude, boyish body made his startled mother catch her breath. Never had his father, nor any other male whom she had chanced to see in puris naturalibus, possessed any such physique as this, her son, now showed her so unconsciously.
But, good God, what a travesty! The feminine drawers now sat comfortably upon Phil's loins and bottom. And he was slipping a beribboned chemisette over his head.
The latter garment was short on his goodly form, barely passing the waistband of the drawers. He turned somewhat now-gazing eagerly into a mirror. His cheeks grew pinker. He seemed to snuggle delightedly into his lovely mother's intimate apparel.
And-heavens-why should this silly masquerading cause that article which Marie had last seen, years earlier, as just a white tassel-but which had been so formidable yesterday against her bottom and her belly-to project dismayingly, as if trying to burst through the muslin?
Turning away from the door once more, Phillip stripped off the two garments. Nervously, Marie uncertain just what she should do in these incomprehensible circumstances-laid a small fist to her lips to restrain ejaculations and the labored sound of her breathing as she studied admiringly the rearward of her boy's body.
She saw him pick up another garment; a sort of combination of light blue silk and saffron laces. He donned it, with sidelong glances into the mirror which showed a flushed cheek and gray eyes which gleamed. Obviously Phil found his peculiar recreation absorbing.
The boy turned again toward the looking glass, and once more his mother could see all the front view of his quaint, flat bosomed, curly-headed, almost girlish charm in this abnormal accoutrement.
Ah yes-he looked girlish now, but far handsomer than any girl, his mother thought. But-oh no-not girlish and she stifled a little nervous cry just in time.
For just then-through the front orifice of the conveniently opened undergarment-there projected hastily, as if bounding into view, the ruddy, uncapped knob and the white, tense body of a turgid and excited virility.
His beautiful mother, who had been conscious of a vague wonder that her adolescent lad should find this surprising occupation agitating or even interesting, was beyond all cogent thought now in face of her first actual sight of Phillip as an excited, potent manhood in effervescence.
She could only stare-shrinking back lest she should be seen-and clutch her white, pink-tipped, manicured fingers into fists and press them to round, firm breasts where her heart seemed to be fluttering audibly.
She saw her boy denude himself again. Turning this way and that-and giving the maternal Peeping Tom every aspect of his fine, boyish nakedness-he appeared to be tucking all these fluffy, pretty things away into the wardrobe drawers from which he had extricated them. For a glance at the ormolu clock on his mother's dresser had apprised him that his moments of solitude might be few.
Yet he seemed to be searching for some particular article. Still naked, he slipped around the foot of the bed. On a chair lay a delicate chemise of thin, exquisite gray silk, which Marie had worn the evening previous under her dinner gown and at a dance later on.
This Phillip lifted hastily-seeing it somewhat ruffled and knowing it to have been worn by his mother very recently. His face almost scarlet, he sniffed at the garment-and probably his sensitive nostrils caught the delicate aroma of Marie's preferred perfume and Marie's dainty sex.
For suddenly, breathing hard, he kissed hotly the fabric in front, again and again, just at the spot where it must have come into contact with his mother's privacies. He muffled his head in it, he hugged it, kissing ever more wildly.
The tiny clock struck its silvery note. Hastily Phil raised a flushed and guilty face from the chemise. He restored it to its former place and made for the door.
And his mother fled-yes-she could think of nothing to say or to do in this amazing juncture. No doubt it was her duty to take action-to reveal her knowledge of Phil's apparently obsessing new mania-if it was a mania-and to give him "what for" in some disciplinary, curative way for the indelicacy which involved her as well as her son.
Possibly her sense of helplessness-of being unwilling to confront the lad, strangely excited as she herself was, was partly due to her guilty knowledge that she was in no position to reproach him for "indelicacy"-she, who had been drawn into a maelstrom of little excesses with rather wild persons of a distinctly fast set.
Like a ghost she glided from the suite to return presently for luncheon chattering volubly, in a way to which the Judge had not been accustomed of late-but never catching the eyes of her silent son.
CHAPTER FOUR
Phillip made up his mind-as a full day elapsed without any reference being made to the episode upon the beach-that it was to be passed over in silence.
He could not interpret his lovely mother's almost continuous silence toward him-the odd, constrained little glances which he caught now and then-the hasty peck of the goodnight kiss which they always exchanged.
But the ice seemed to be thawing the following morning. As if Marie could not endure longer this unloving relation with her preferred child, she took him into her arms and kissed his brow and cheeks and temples when they met at breakfast-served in their own suite.
In a flowing kimono of rich, white, Chinese silk, her heavy, dark golden hair, with its reddish shimmer, flowing over her shoulders and back, she was a creature of marvelous beauty.
Neither Judge Brower nor Dorcas, Dora and Nesta had yet emerged from their rooms. And Marie decided that since she could hardly let the affair on the beach go unnoticed under penalty of losing control of her son-this was the time to mention it and then consign it to oblivion.
"You were very bad embarrassing your mother by so unseemly a joke yesterday," she said, shaking a finger at Phil, but with her pink lips tending to curve into a forgiving smile upon his first sign of contrition.
"The idea of showing that crowd-almost strangers, some of them-a pair of my panties! And it seemed all the worse, coming from my own big son . .
"It wasn't a joke, mother," said the boy steadily. "I meant that you should go aside and put them on. And as for those men seeing your drawers-that's far better than for them to see places where the drawers ought to be and find the garment missing."
His mother turned beet red, stifling a kind of shamed fury as best she could in view of the fact that her husband or their daughters might enter at any instant.
"You'll attend to your own affairs-I have no excuses to make to a child-nor any supervision to accept from him," she stammered angrily and, having declined to make excuses, went on to make them.
"We, that is, sensible persons, dress as we like down here in this informal place during the hot weather. And those who are gentlemen, which you were not yesterday, pay no attention whatever to minor inadvertencies.
"Prudery has no place at Palm Beach-for which the Lord be thanked. I'm beginning to think my son is a throw-back to the moronic Puritans," she said, and then, suddenly recalling how she had secretly seen, that son engaged the morning before, she flushed vividly and cast him a sudden wondering glance under lowered lashes.
"In any event," she concluded lamely, "I've warned you. If you, a schoolboy, fail to approve of your mother's friends down here and of the pleasant times she has with them, just leave them and me alone-especially," she added in a hurried afterthought, "especially these girls and young matrons who make eyes at you and who are so much older than you in worldly knowledge, if not in years. I won't have them dragging you off into comers." And Marie stamped her small foot.
"Understand!" she cried, quite sidetracked now in her earnestness from her previous topic. "If I so much as learn that you have let Betty or Thalia or Laura or Leila take you away for what they would term a walk and a chat back you go to Lawrenceville before the vacation is ended!"
There was not even mutiny in the calm face which Phillip turned upon his mother-but the lovely Marie, having at least some slight conception of the depths of determination in this child of her own loins, bit her rosy lower lip and looked at him uneasily in the face of his ominous silence.
But if the scene upon the beach on the previous day had had its tremendous element of chagrin for Marie Brower, she was to have an experience in the day just opening so discomposing that it was like a tornado as compared with that earlier zephyr.
She had a particularly favored wisp of a red bathing suit among her water and beach apparel. A garment which could be counted on to draw every eye and make her the uncrowned and almost naked princess of the beach.
Sewn in a single tiny piece, it had no back whatever. The side slopes of her marvelous breasts were visible even when she sat or stood perfectly still in this garment-and with any little twisting movement a pink nipple would emerge to one side or the other to be negligently tucked away again when Marie deigned to catch sight of it.
The upper front part of the suit was composed merely of not too broad straps, which descended to cover the centers of her breasts but to reveal her otherwise almost to the navel.
When she arose and paced toward the surf, the lower half of each glorious buttock gave its curving nudity to the pleased eyes of those about her. The garment was, in effect, just a pair of red suspenders supporting a very narrow and thin silk breechcloth-so thin, in fact, that, when the fabric was strained about the exuberance of her fine hips, the skin shone whitely through.
It was the afternoon bathing hour. Marie, clad, if one might call it that, in this dark red trifle, was the laughing center of a throng which included almost everyone of the younger set privileged to approach her.
The slender, attractive bodies of Betty McAlister, Thalia Martin and Mrs. Leila Dunham-as well as the full fleshed but shapely body of Mrs. Laura Senter-were almost as bare as that of Marie Brower.
But they did not seem so-perhaps because there were something gloriously lascivious, immaculately beautiful about the exposed person of the eminent jurist's spouse which drew every eye to the almost entire exclusion of the rest of the girls.
But once again a censorious, ominous spectre hovered to the rear of the chattering, mirthful group. Phillip had quickly and joyously adapted himself to the lenient mode which permitted boys-or even older males, if they chose-to wear no more than a pair of trunks for their bathing in this pseudo Continental resort.
If his mother was nude-why, he was nuder. Yet the glaring impropriety was, of course, all hers. For a boy's body was of lecherous interest to nobody, he was convinced-and he saw male eyes gleam and male faces redden whenever his mother stirred and thereby caused the tempting, rosy tip of a breast to emerge from its covering strap.
This time he had come prepared-for, lurking on the veranda, he had seen a breeze blow aside his mother's wrap as she emerged and reveal what she wore-and he had hurried to her room-to descend a little later bearing again a small package.
In the bundle which he had brought were two articles. One of these he now took out and approached the large group. Unobserved at first, he noted the satin brown into which many suns had now beautifully tanned his mother's rippling, exquisite back, naked now to the upper swell of the buttocks.
He saw how each nervous movement-when she bent to claw some man's hair jocularly-or when she twisted slightly in a spasm of silvery laughter-brought from under cover skin like snow in its lovely contrast to the sunburned portions.
Stepping to one side as he observed masculine eyes glow suddenly, he saw a naked nipple, stiffened by its owner's excitement, glide from beneath a strap. He saw the blonde George Dunham bend swiftly and furtively to try to lay a shaven cheek upon the tiny protuberance.
"Look out!" cried his wife in a laughing warning. "He wants his nana. He sucks terribly!"
"Oh, a thousand for a sip of that!" pleaded the plump Stone.
"Behave yourselves!" smiled Marie, covering up summarily the projecting point. "Heavens, these modes are terrible. One has to sit as still as an idol or else ..
CHAPTER FIVE
"Good God-why, it's the drawers purveyor!" exclaimed tall Terry Grayson indignantly, as a shadow fell over the group and a long lounging robe of yellow silk was laid over the shoulders of Marie Brower.
"Listen, you'll get yourself disliked, son," remarked dark, slender John Breedon, who, his arm about his fiancee, Thalia Martin, had a hand snuggled upon her bare belly under the front of her tenuous and scant suit.
"Out on another crusade, darling?" called Thalia sweetly. "I wish you'd protect me against this horrid Jack. He simply can't make his hands behave. Two inches lower down with his fingers and he'll have me in a frightful plight!"
"You shan't pester dear Phil," cried the elfin Leila delightedly. "See, precious reformer, I need reforming far more than your lovely mother. You shall take me down the beach as far as you like and reform me to your heart's content.
"But leave mummsey alone-for these bad men are all wild about her-very justifiably-and they'll simply claw the ground if you try to keep her covered!"
"Don't worry-any of you!" gasped Marie, now just recovering from the stupefaction which was merging into a blind rage.
"This is the final appearance for the season of this insulting youngster at Palm Beach. Tomorrow he'll be on his way toward the chilly north-and a very good riddance of a presumptuous, spoiled, unnatural son!"
She arose to her feet-both exquisite breasts surging forth nude in her turbulent movements-and, hauling off the yellow mantle and crumpling it, she fairly hurled it into the face of Phil.
Calmly-but his face a trifle white-he caught it and placed it under his arm with the package which he carried.
"You come with me, young man, we'll have no scene here, but I've got a few things to say to you," said Marie, her voice trembling with ire and agitation. And she struck at him like a cat as he coolly bent to draw the fabric over her naked breasts.
Shaking with wrath, she deliberately bared her bust again in face of this silent, audacious rebuke from her child before all this crew. Phillip caught her by a wrist and swung her about from the now silent, hugely interested crowd who watched this amazing duel.
Suddenly the pair departed-side by side and in utter silence now-as if reawakened breeding warned them to have out their scene elsewhere.
"How he will catch it-the poor, nervy, senseless but rather darling young spoilsport!" giggled Betty McAlister excitedly. "For Marie can be a spitfire when she's angry, and certainly she's endured enough to make any woman angry, mother or no mother!"
"She can't beat him, that's a cinch," observed Leila's husband reflectively. "He's too old, and, besides, he's such a strong young creature. I'll bet he could lick any two of us men."
"She can't beat him-no-but you can wager she's got her own ways of maintaining family discipline in any emergency," his wife informed him. "And, before she's through telling him what's what, he'll wish she was merely beating him! Where in the devil are they going!"
"She's taking him to those little isolated bathhouses over there," suggested Thalia, her voice somewhat broken because of the fact that the audacious John Breedon had taken advantage of all the confusion to let his fingers slip those fateful two inches downward into a silken grove on a soft mound-from which she could not force them to withdraw without attracting the attention of all these others to the liberty he was taking.
"You say 'she's taking him,' but I wonder?" mused the plump and keen-eyed Laura aloud. "Could it be by any chance that he's taking her? I have a funny hunch, an almost unbelievable hunch, but-do you notice a strange tension, a sort of drawing back or dragging on the part of Marie?
"And-good heavens-he's got the yellow mantle on her again even while they are walking! He's holding it about her with one arm and gripping her wrists, I fancy, with his other hand.
"Great God, can it be possible! What a perfectly unspeakable humiliation for her-since she can't help knowing we're watching!"
"I could thrash the young catamount myself-if I really thought that you were right and. that he was using violence on his beautiful young mother!" declared the pudgy, rosy Stone.
"Don't fret," drawled George Dunham, "Marie is the boss of her family all right enough. She can't have a wrestling bout as a sequel to the public scene, but when she gets him alone she'll have him in tears in a minute. And naturally she doesn't want to go to the hotel for that. She's enduring his impertinence until she can get him alone and far from listening ears."
"Well, I still insist that she may not find herself the boss at all," murmured the satin-skinned, auburn-haired Laura. "I don't think she's the boss this minute if you ask me. I think she's more like a captive-who is going to be distinctly up against it-and who is beginning to realize that fact.
"Oh-oh just what do you suppose such a strong, splendid naked boy-in just a pair of trunks-and with all his muscles flexible-could have the heart to do to a girl?" queried Laura dreamily.
"It's not a question of 'a girl,' " snapped Jack Breedon suddenly. "It's a question of his own mother and of whether she can manage him or must endure his insulting silent comments on her apparel and her ways."
"We must admit that dear Marie was-and usually is during the bathing hours-a trifle nude. Somewhat of a dismaying and shaming sight, one might suppose, for an affectionate son," said Leila, carefully looking to see that neither of her own tiny nipples was peering out before she spoke.
And she added, sotto voce, to her husband, but perfectly audibly for the others:
"You know, George, that when she spreads her legs the very least bit with that red suit on, locks of hair peek out to either side of the narrow band between them-and, in broad daylight, with strangers about, that's pretty fierce!"
"Jealous-jealous of her goodly audacity-that's what you girls are," vouchsafed George, and he made the darkly elfin woman squeal and wriggle and protest vehemently by diving a hand between her own legs and triumphantly letting the others see that he held a lock of black hair in his fingers and was tugging upon it.
"All right-strip me naked-your own wife-before this mad mob-and see if I care!" cried Leila indignantly, as she dislodged his fingers and made sure that her sexual apparatus was covered.
"Another instant and you would have had me showing everything I've got!"
"Serve you right, for appearing to defend that young jackanapes who has the brazen nerve to try to dictate to his mother about her clothes," remarked George.
"One would think she was the child and he the stem parent. If he had his way-and the adorable Marie went Puritan-lots of our jolly fun would be gone."
"Anyway, it would seem to be up to the head of the family, Judge Brower, to make whatever fuss is made. Wouldn't it?" observed Grayson. "Rather than that a kid of a schoolboy should try to dictate , .
"Yes, don't think for a minute that we girls are unaware why you men want Marie Brower left alone to wear whatever she pleases, if anything," said dainty Betty demurely.
"To be sure, she's got a glorious body-just about perfect, I should say."
"Well-if I had a son like Phil," murmured Laura Senter, still dreamily and running white sand through her whiter fingers; "I, I don't know, but I think I should hesitate a long time before offending him or trying to cross him."
"Heavens! The boy seems to have you absolutely awed!" said Thalia, looking at her married friend curiously. "What a cinch he would have in getting his own way if you were his mother! You'd roll over and play dead and beg if he cocked a finger at you."
Laura cast a handful of sand at the sparkling, pretty fiancee of John Breedon. Whereupon Thalia sprang upon her and rolled the fine, great, shapely, creamy, almost nude body in the sand.
The bout continued-to be avidly watched-for Thalia, weighing hardly more than two-thirds her friend's hundred and fifty pounds, meant to plant her fully upon her back. And Laura, resisting, flushed, seeming unaccountably shamed, resisted the effort to subdue her.
"Thalia can always take this dame, got the Indian sign on her, in spite of Laura's size and muscles," confided Jack to the others, with a sort of peculiar masculine innocence in regard to an unidentified element in this tussle which was making the other girls cast quick glances at each other and at the men-to see whether these latter were noticing. "It was so at college, Thalia has told me that...."
But he himself was getting a little pink now, in consonance with the others, as he saw his fiancee squeezed between two naked, creamy, shapely, large thighs while Laura made a desperate and complaining effort to fight off the humiliation which she felt close at hand.
One big, firm, rose-tipped breast of the young wife of the absent corporation lawyer had been deprived of all covering in their gyrations and struggles-while both of Thalia's dainty mammary hillocks were bared as her shoulder straps gave way. And when Jack would have repaired this damage he was vigorously hauled back by two of the other men.
"God!" ejaculated the plump Stone-to be checked by a warning glance from Grayson which seemed to implore him not to startle the struggling, absorbed girls by revealing that an abnormal element was visible in their conflict.
Grating small, white teeth, Thalia was giving all her wiry force to the task of planting her married chum upon her back. The strength of Laura was so obviously greater than her own that it seemed almost miraculous to see the larger girl gradually yielding perforce before the determined assault.
And it was not until his wife nudged him forcibly and pointed that George Dunham observed how the tense, shapely body of Thalia was twisting directly between the naked, parted thighs of Laura Senter-how one sex was in direct and moving contact with the other-and how Laura-her round cheeks flaming-was slowly giving way before such an attack as her former college mate had, no doubt, found always effective in subduing her.
Beginning as a jest, continuing as a determined, proud effort on the part of the smaller girl to show these others she could force a yielding and a flattening of Laura, the bout had reached a stage of forgetfulness of spectators on the part of both.
That was evident from the very sensuality of the scene as Thalia, with her friend almost planted upon her back, weakened Laura's remaining power of resistance by rubbing her own thinly veiled little hirsute mound upon the plump sexual hillock which projected roundly through the one piece bathing suit of Mrs. Senter.
She had lowered her cheek to lay it upon the fine naked breast of Laura while she clutched her firmly about the loins-and the latter, struggling, heaving, showing now, as she writhed, a large and half naked bottom, was still sufficiently conscious that they were observed to try desperately to avert her own downfall.
Looking somewhat anxiously about in search of possible alien eyes the onlookers gathered closely about to shield their friends. For Thalia, her scrap of a blue bathing suit giving way almost entirely, was stripped to the waist by this time; and ever and again her snowy, coral tipped breasts gleamed in the sunlight as she raised her torso, only to sink it again upon its living mattress.
Her fiancee, as hugely interested as the others by this time, went so far as to call whispering, nudging attention to the excitement attested by the way in which the nipples of both Thalia and Laura stood forth upon their bosoms.
It was over. Laura was conquered. Her eyes closed, she lay flattened upon her bare back, breathing heavily. Convulsively her smooth, nude thighs clasped her conqueror. Like a woman ravished, helpless, overcome, she responded feebly, with rising passion, to the imperative luscious movements of Thalia upon the most delicate region of her fine body.
Becoming dimly conscious now that she and her subdued friend were affording a licentious spectacle there in the glare of the sun, Thalia yet was moved to signalize her triumph-after she had, with difficulty, freed herself from the now convulsive clasp of Laura's thighs and from the naked legs which surrounded her-by creeping upward and laying her bare breasts, one after another, upon the rosy lips of the older woman-who obediently and fervently kissed each stiff nipple. Then, her face glowing a crimson defiance into the eyes of her fiance and all the others, she raised the straps of her dismantled suit and turned to allow Jack to refasten the buttons at each shoulder.
"That was lovely, simply lovely!" exclaimed Leila, hastening to try to bring countenance to the flushed girls who had given this remarkable public display.
"Oh, if I owned the great big beauty," murmured Betty enviously, too excited to mind at all the revelation of her feelings and her usually pallid little face rosy. "What she'd have to do to me!"
"See, I'm just a property now!" quavered Laura, still trembling and scarlet. "Oh Thalia, I could shake you!"
"Never fret, sweetness," enjoined George gallantly.
"You were adorable, both of you, and you're absolutely among friends. And if Jack here hasn't got any kick coming, I don't see that the rest of us matter . .
"Jack-kick!" exclaimed Leila, with a pert, wicked smile. "Why, Jack is likely to find married life all the lovelier because his wife has such a very dear and complacent friend!"
"I shall go away-you're thoroughly bad-all of you!" breathed the shamed Laura. "Misconstruing a playful tussle between two girls that way! And I didn't have to-give way-only it's kind to succumb to the weaker person."
She scrambled to her feet-and would have made off had not the now composed Thalia, after exchanging a queer little smile with her fiance, taken her by a hand and detained her.
CHAPTER SIX
"What I want to know," observed Leila, changing the subject suddenly, "is, what has become of our Marie and her imperious censor of a sixteen-year-old."
"They've vanished. Curse it, I'd like to know ... said her husband thoughtfully.
"I saw Marie go into the last one of those three bath cabins," observed Francis Stone. "She had just succeeded in yanking off the yellow robe. I could see from here how fed her face was. She threw the robe on the ground.
"I saw her dart suddenly to one side as if to make off-and damned if the young rascal didn't grab her and absolutely shove her into the open door. I don't know what has become of him for my attention was distracted just then by Thalia and Laura."
"Trying to run away from him, good heavens!" cried Betty incredulously. "But she announced-and she meant it, too-that she wanted to get him alone and give him what for! Maybe she wanted to get his father to thrash him or something."
"I'd like to see the amiable, rather hen-pecked Judge trying to thrash anyone!" crowed Thalia. "But this is certainly a swell little mystery. I'd like to know just what is going on."
"It's none of our business, of course," said John Breedon. "But...."
He looked around at the others.
"Nevertheless, we're her friends," suggested Betty eagerly. "And besides she needn't ever know we were anywhere around-if we're careful."
Meanwhile an extraordinary scene was being staged in the small and secluded bath cabin-erected, with other scattered ones, for the benefit of the occasional villa dweller who didn't wish to come to the beach prepared for a plunge.
A tall, sturdy, reddened utterly determined youth, clad very succinctly in a pair of narrow black trunks, stood just inside the closed door, which he had carefully bolted behind him.
Against the farther wall crouched as if to spring, a woman of surpassing beauty. She was shivering with anger, her small fingers curled into talons. If looks could have slain her son, she would already have been a filicide.
The boy had unwrapped from its shrouding paper and was now shaking forth a somber and voluminous feminine bathing suit. Voluminous, that is, when compared with the red wisp of silk which clung to the glorious body before him.
"This is what you want, mother," he said calmly. "I ask you to put it on in place of that shred you have there. You are far too lovely and fine to reveal your beauty to these loafers as you have been doing."
Too furious-too convulsed and shaken-to be moved just now by the compliment, Marie burst into frenzied words.
"God, if only your father were a real man, how I'd love to make him thrash you into the hospital!" she gasped. "Brutalizing your own mother this way-wrenching me along by the wrists-after insulting me publicly-and then actually shoving me into this hut!"
"It's because I love you," said the boy mildly. "If I didn't love you-if you weren't the sweetest mother on earth, when you are yourself-I wouldn't care how many kinds of a silly, indecent flapper you made of yourself before strangers."
"You, you love me?" responded Marie more quietly. "Well, I have always been glad to think so-and God knows whether I have loved my son! But my son has gone," she rasped, as the memory of her wrongs overcame her momentary softening.
"It was a young rowdy, a brute, who took advantage of his superior strength and my own fear of a terrible public scandal to hustle me along the beach and into this hut just now!
"I may forgive you sometime, but it will be a long time hence! Meanwhile, I want you to go away from here-and to go back north this very day-and never to dare to try to censor me again in any way whatever!"
"You won't need 'censoring'-within a very few days after you've regained your senses," replied Phillip, with determined calmness. "But meanwhile, I want you to take off that bit of red cloth and put on this black silk suit I've brought."
"Not-in-one-thousand-years!" panted his mother. "I suppose no such unnatural and insulting son ever lived before as you are!"
"I wasn't going to make you go down there and show these idlers the change you had made in this bath house," observed Phil quietly. "But, I swear, if you don't switch from one suit to the other instantly, you will make the change anyhow-and then you'll go with me back to that bunch-and let them see that you can be beautiful and decently covered at the same time."
"My God, you'd never try to subject me to that overwhelming ignominy!" gasped his mother. "Why, they'd know instantly that you had made me do it!"
In silence Phil held up the suit he had brought.
"I'd never, never be able to face any of them again!" cried Marie, very near to tears now and her voice shaky. "And they would tell it all about! I won't-I won't-and you can't make me-you wretch-oh, you rough neck-you ruffian-take your hands off me!"
And she clasped desperately at the straps of the red suit as the boy leaned to unbutton them.
"I'll scream-people will come-and you will have to let me out-and I shall run, clothes or no clothes!" threatened Marie desperately.
"If you can face that scandal-why, I guess I'll have to," said Phil, straightening up. "I was going to go out and let you make the transfer in solitude.
"But if you've got a plunge out of that door in mind, I'll have to stay to prevent it. But the choice is still yours whether you will strip and dress again or whether I shall have to do it for you."
"I'll never, never-and you most certainly shan't, you wicked, brazen boy!" cried his mother defiantly.
A gasping cry burst from her lips as she was taken beneath an arm that seemed like iron. The single button at each shoulder yielded in a trice to Phil's fingers. The straps fell, and, naked to the waist, kicking, subduing her cries through fear of the inevitable scandal which would ensue if they were heard, Marie wrestled with her son in the narrow confines of the cabin.
She was panting, gasping, but not pleading, in her pride and obstinacy as she caught at the smooth, white body of her powerful child.
Accusations and threats came in a flood from her lips-drawn now in a face from which the color had largely fled.
"You're perverse, wicked!" she cried. "I saw you trying on my drawers and things quite naked and showing clearly how naughty it made you feel! I shall tell your father. I shall tell everybody!"
She was hanging over his arm now-her useless struggles abandoned-while the boy, his eyes bright and glowing, seemed almost in a trance as he surveyed the exquisite naked torso, the white, smooth loins and lower belly, the velvet brown of the back and chest.
He seemed to hesitate to denude her further. He was breathing hard now-but not from the struggle-and there seemed to be something communicated from his nerves to those of his mother which made Marie shiver and the color rush to her face once more.
In a new desperation, she struggled again-catching at the breechcloth of the boy by chance-and, just as she shrieked, feeling her lone garment glide from her loins over her buttocks and thighs, she felt the naked and standing member of her son against one of her pawing hands.
Half bending, keeping his naked mother crushed and subdued beneath his muscular left arm, the boy was hauling the red fabric over her hanging bare feet.
He heard her gasping and breathing hard-otherwise very silent-her objurgating ceased. And suddenly he was aware that her chance clutchings had resulted in the lowering of his trunks, which clung to his thighs just below the crotch, and that a soft hand was curling about his excited and stiff organ.
"Monster-monster!" murmured his mother now, as Phil, agitated as never before in his life, stood stock still and trembled under the influx of sensations novel to him. But he clung to the warm, soft, exquisite nude body as if fearing it might wriggle from his clasp.
Whether the epithet "monster" was intended to be derogatory of the impetuous boy himself or eulogistic of such a white, hard and tempting staff as Marie had never before touched was left undetermined.
After the shock which overwhelmed her nerves as she realized that she was actually clutching the swollen sex of her own adolescent son-which, although she knew it not, had hardly been absent from her thoughts since she had seen the boy so oddly occupied in her boudoir-she excused herself mentally for continuing the abnormal contact by deciding that she had now found a way to subdue her arrogant offspring.
"Ah-you are tamer-not so vicious and brutal now," she panted. "I'll show you that a mother can control her son, when he uses physical violence.
"These are sensitive regions-I'll squeeze-unless you let me up this instant-and unless you put my red bathing suit back on me and-"
Both her white hands were perversely upon him now. Ten fingertips, which seemed like a thousand to the thrilled, but ashamed boy-wound their soft tentacles, strayed in spidery touches, appraising this stupefying and indelicate delicacy, fathoming its length and hardness occasionally squeezing it in an unrealized threat to use force to compel obedience.
"Stripping your own mother naked-as if she were some wretched girl-making her descend to a very indecent maneuver to get the better of you!" murmured Marie, scolding softly still, but in a quavering voice, in the effort to justify what she was doing.
"I'll squeeze this great thing very hard. I'll probably hurt you, unless you apologize and dress me again as I was, and, and-let me go!"
The intense determination of the crusading youth, crusading against the follies of the day and against what he thought the temporary aberration of his lovely mother which had allowed her to be drawn into them-took the upper hand as he suddenly realized that he was rapidly losing all self-control in the rapture of this libidinous caress.
That his mother should descend to trying to sway him, to "punish" him, to gain the lost ascendancy over him through such touches was to him additional evidence of the temporary blight which had fallen upon her delicacy and refinement through her associations of recent weeks.
He thought her practically out of her head-which, indeed, she was-nor was he far from that state himself.
Suddenly, he held her at arm's length loosing her hold upon his person. But as the woman, her lovely face scarlet and her gray eyes dazed but gleaming, sought to hug him, to be tender and forgiving and loving with this, her son, Phillip gave a hoarse little exclamation and drew her to his embrace.
Naked, tingling from head to foot, they pressed their bodies tightly together, with arms about each other's necks, and their lips met in an ecstatic kiss.
"Phil-oh, Phil-my darling boy, my sweet son!" moaned Marie, her white, silken belly vibrating against the turgid monster which she had been petting.
"Mother, precious mother!" whispered the lad huskily. "You know how I love you-and I didn't suppose there was anything in the world as beautiful as you are-quite naked-this way!
"But you must be good. You mustn't lower yourself with these specimens of wealthy riffraff. I want you to draw on this reasonably decent black suit now and never again to show your treasures so intimately to those men."
Still in her trance of libidinous admiration for her lad, Marie struggled for a moment against the unwinding of their arms. Yielding at length, she stood dazedly-her snowy, heaving belly, her curling, ruddy genital grove, her round breasts illuminated beneath his eyes by light from the small window-and allowed him to thrust her feet and legs into the comparatively sedate garment which he had brought.
Then suddenly, overwhelmed by the realization that she was being driven like a child in an utter ignoring of her own proud will she staged a revolt so fierce that she threatened to tear to shreds the black silk of the suit which Phillip had just drawn up over her shoulders and was seeking to button there.
"Get away from me!" she panted. "You don't deserve my tenderness, my affection. No one in the world can shame me by telling me what I may or may not do. And certainly not my own ill-tempered and spoiled child!
"I saw you, vicious boy, kissing my discarded chemise in the very spot where it had touched me most intimately. And you would set up as the arbiter of my behavior! For shame, Phillip!"
It may be that this not entirely undeserved rebuke touched off a certain spark in the boy's nature. In any event, he drew the struggling woman to him with a grip of iron.
In grim silence, his face crimson beneath his brown, curly hair, he peeled the black silk downward once more. The lily of his mother's body was revealed now to below the haunches. And suddenly, amazed and shamed, bitterly protesting, weeping with mortification and rage, Marie found herself face downward across the naked thigh which Phil had elevated by placing his left foot upon the wooden bench.
Holding both her slender wrists in the grasp of a single hand beneath her belly, the boy began to belabor with sounding smacks the snowy heaps of the adorable bottom.
Wrenches and tugs soon proved to the nervously sobbing Marie her utter helplessness to extricate herself from her son's grasp, to alter her posture or to do anything whatever to evade his will.
Nevertheless, she continued to squirm and writhe as best she could, keeping as silent as possible, since not for anything in the world would she have had this, her shameful fate, known to any other mortal.
A gasp responded to each stinging blow now. The white behind was beginning to turn ruddy, to bum almost intolerably. The gasps merged rapidly into angry, involuntary little cries. The cries became plaintive, pleading as the smacks became even harder and as the disgraced woman found herself dreading each severe slap on flesh which ached already.
Suddenly she was all volcanic, shaking wrath once more. Her soft voice hoarse with rage and shame, she demanded imperiously her instant release.
She kicked out spasmodically as each blow fell thuddingly and, hoisted high on her son's knee, she thus involuntarily revealed to his starting eyes, ever and again the rosy portals of her sex.
And on this incredibly enticing sight, on the dark golden tendrils which curled down about the coral lips, the burning eyes of the agitated boy blazed fixedly whenever the glorious thighs were flung apart.
In her writhing, convulsive movements, Marie achieved another result-speedily known to her, as her posterior revelations were not. For her soft belly heaved upward in her contortions and now the firm young hand which held her bound wrists lay maddeningly upon her genital mound and now her thighs, flung apart in torment, gave it admission between them.
Each smack now brought a heavy sigh from the parted lips of the helpless woman. Her breath hissed between her white, exposed teeth. No longer did her thighs tend to be cast apart in vigorous kicks as her spanking continued.
Rather did they squeeze nervously together upon her son's fist and upon her own clutched wrists. Her cries of pain and frantic ire were no longer heard. There was silence, save for the labored breathing of the pair and for the sound of the steadily falling blows.
As for the pain-why, Marie was bewilderedly aware that she hardly felt it now. A smarting, a burning, as each blow descended-yes-but the heat, the sting, seemed entered into her surging blood-invading her nerves, centering deliciously within her sex. With a little moan of intense pleasure too acute to allow her to remain inactive, the beautiful culprit rubbed the groove of her womanhood against the back of her son's hand spasmodically.
She heard Phil gasp now and she felt herself released, set softly upon her feet. Unable to speak, unable to look at the boy, she crumpled upon the bench and wept softly into her shrouding hands.
She could not even think or consider what she must do about this unbelievable thing which had happened. But now, at his touch upon her shoulder, she looked up through her tears. She found herself stretching out naked toes at his mute direction for the black silk which had fallen entirely from her body while she was being punished.
For that was what had happened-she had been punished-punished like the veriest child-and by her own son! With sidelong, shielded, furtive glances, she looked at his glowing face, at all his virile, upstanding nakedness, while she allowed herself to be shrouded in the suit which he had chosen.
"Almighty God!" muttered a stifled and unheard voice outside the cabin.
"Hush-hush-they're coming out! Run-hide-we mustn't on any account be seen-any of us," panted another voice.
"Christ-what an affair-wholly unbelievable!" muttered a third voice, as a soft scampering over the sand to the rear of a hillock near by ensued.
"Thank God for those cracks!" wheezed George Dunham, as the scouting party settled in concealment. "For I wouldn't have missed that scene for anything!"
"God, oh, God!" breathed Mrs. Laura Senter into her next neighbor's ear as they lay face downward upon the sand. "What a boy, what a wonderful boy!"
"Brutal as a fiend, I should say!" whispered Stone in return.
She gave him languishing, startled eyes-and then, as the tall Grayson was moved to draw her close from the other side, she abandoned the uncomprehending Stone.
"How he made her atone-for rebellion-and for what he considered improper!" she murmured to Grayson. "And all naked!"
She shivered luxuriously.
"How his wife-when he marries-will have to step around when he speaks!" she added. "He'll control her whip her-make her do as he likes!"
She was softly panting herself-and not resisting in the least as, unseen of the others, the flushed and sensual Grayson, apprised now of what was going on in her imagination, kissed the side of a more than half nude breast and then, running a hand downward, took surreptitious possession of the bare lower curve of one buttock.
He pinched the abundant flesh agitatedly, almost cruelly, and Laura gave a little exclamation of mingled pain and delirious excitement and snuggled up to him with a warmth which was unmistakable.
Now that brazen hand was being inserted beneath the fabric-all of the big, velvety soft, naked bottom was at its disposal.
"Please-oh, please-I'll be good!" whispered the auburn-haired young matron. And she kissed him hotly upon the lips as, unable even to simulate smacks under that clinging fabric, the man gave her nipping pinch after pinch.
"I shall whip you-you shall be well thrashed!" the man breathed threateningly, in the ghost of an undertone. "I shall make you draw up your clothes or I shall strip you quite naked, you naughty girl, and I shall use my slipper or my hand or a whip on this wonderful bottom, as I please.
"And you will have no girl, like Thalia, between your splendid thighs afterwards for I shall make you lie down and receive me into your body as further punishment!"
"Oh God-please don't be very harsh!" whispered Laura shakily. "When must I endure all this? Where shall you take me?"
"Out under the sky somewhere," came the gruff, agitated whisper of Grayson, "where you will suffer the more from fear of being seen while you are treated as you deserve.
"I shall wallow in your satin, creamy skin, in the voluptuous flesh of your fine body. I don't think your famous husband has the least idea of your real needs-of the way to keep you in order. I shall whip you much harder than this and very frequently."
Shaking with an anguished delight, Laura felt him withdraw his nipping fingers from within her scant clothing and smack the naked lower curves of her soft, exuberant bottom so hard that the others in the spying party, intent though they were on observing the now utterly quiet bathhouse whence two persons might emerge at any instant, heard and looked up to smile meaningly at each other or to turn red, according to their natures.
Shamed to the core though she was, Laura-after catching softly and vainly at Grayson's wrist-gave way. With face buried in her hands, she rubbed her vibrating belly in the sand and endured what now took on the semblance of a real castigation.
"You will not dare venture even to beg me not to thrash you-when I get you alone," went on the frantically happy Grayson, beginning to realize to the full for the first time how entirely the peculiar nature and hidden yearnings of this plump, pretty wife of an eminent barrister gave her into his hands. You will plead, though...." Ceasing his slaps, he had run a hand beneath her. His fingers, penetrating to her nude crotch, were giving her unutterable sensations.
"You will plead," he whispered, "to be allowed to win your forgiveness by taking my stiff member into your mouth-and by sucking it warmly, lovingly. I shall permit this.
"And you will suck me even while I am finishing your flogging. And when the lash falls idle from your reddened buttocks while you continue to kneel before me, you will give all your solicitous care to completing my enjoyment. You will make me spend between your lovely lips and you will swallow eagerly what issues from me."
"God oh my God!" quavered the woman. "No, oh, no!"
"No?" queried Grayson, pinching the throbbing lips of her hidden nook.
"No, ah, I mean-yes!" panted Laura.
CHAPTER SEVEN
"I notice that your handsome young son is still in our midst, Marie," observed Betty McAlister nonchalantly, letting the white sand trickle through her fingers and speaking quite casually.
"I believe you threatened him with banishment yesterday-a trip back to the cold north in the midst of his vacation."
Others in the group carefully avoided looking at the speaker or at the woman whom she addressed or even at each other. For this was a topic upon which each must avoid risking meaning glances or showing any knowledge of an incident of the preceding forenoon-under risk of shattering a situation which appealed to all who had done voluntary secret service work as a piquant and most interesting one, and one of which they were eager to have continuing knowledge.
It was Marie who did a little studying of perfectly bland and almost vacant countenances. Such entire lack of interest appeared ominously artificial.
Color-which, feeling it rise, she inwardly cursed-flooded her beautiful face. She stirred uneasily, as if reminiscently, upon a round backside.
Her heart gave a great throb as she reflected upon the shameful possibility that these friends of hers might be even vaguely apprised of what had happened to her yesterday.
Yet, she reassured and thereby steadied herself with determination, they couldn't possibly know. They had been many, many rods from that bath cabin. There had not been noise enough to attract their attention-even if they had been capable of spying. She had been in there so long-practically imprisoned-that their patience had become worn out and they had scattered for their dip in the surf.
She had seen several of them at luncheon time and there had been nothing unusual in their demeanor. And she had seen none of them about as-with that yellow silk robe carefully covering her black suit-she had walked back to the hotel, leaving Phil to his gambol in the water.
"I was, naturally, very angry with the boy when I spoke yesterday," she observed explanatorily. "He was forward, audacious and wretchedly prudish in his behavior. But he didn't fully comprehend how terribly he embarrassed me.
"He's a peculiar lad in some ways-and anyone dear and near to him seems to be sacrosanct as against all the rest of the world. But he's my son-and after a while I had to forgive him-though you may rest assured that he heard plenty from me before I relented!"
"Are you sure that he didn't get your goat just the least bit, dear?" queried Leila, the astute, calm one, who ventured speech to cover the significant silence of others who feared to try to talk lest they should betray themselves.
"I notice that this dark green suit you have on, although it's tremendously becoming, of course, as all your things are, is, well, quite a bit more voluminous and shrouding than the one you had on yesterday.
"You make the rest of us look quite indecorous by comparison-you, who would usually have only to shake yourself in order to become a naked naiad...."
"I-I have my spells of wanting more covering," said the embarrassed Marie. "It's not decorum which prompts me either-for I laugh, as you know, at the quibbles of the puritanical brigade, and claim the right to have spirit and body as free as possible.
"But sunburn-that's it-some new spots of sunburn which I can't bear to expose to the rays today. When they are healed I shall, of course, wear what I like."
"Of course-one could yield to a son-to a dear, attractive boy like Phil-from sheer affection," mused Thalia aloud, venturing now to glance at the rosy face of her beleaguered friend.
"I myself, for instance, feel that if I had a boy like him, I should bathe in an ulster if I saw it was going to break his heart to see me in public in a swimming suit."
"One funny thing about it, is that he seems to be so sensible and even precocious in many ways, and a true lover of beauty," said George diffidently, for he felt this concealed bantering and badgering rather precarious.
"And-since he's artistic-one would think he would love to see a woman so beautiful in all respects as you splashing about in the surf with nothing on whatever-if that were possible," he added, as a warning glance from his wife called attention to the fact that Grayson and Stone were not cognizant of those nude bathing parties in the moonlight. v
"I fully believe he'd drop dead from chagrin and shame!" remarked Marie, coloring more hotly yet. "He would be shocked to the very marrow by the vision of my nudity!"
"What!" exclaimed Laura Senter incredulously, and with this very genuine young matron of tender years, this odd mixture of simplicity and complicated sensuality, there could be no doubt of the earnestness she felt.
"Do you mean to say, Marie, that he isn't in the least accustomed to seeing you bare? Why, I should think that, from earliest childhood-as a means of bringing him up in a real innocence and avoiding furtive thoughts-one would not hesitate to be naked in the presence of one's dear son ..
Her voice trailed off as glances about her reminded her that at least this "innocence" had been achieved yesterday-while eight pairs of libidinous eyes gazed through cracks at the remarkable scene.
"Not ever-no, not ever!" cried Marie, with more emphasis than the occasion appeared to call for. "And I wouldn't think of such a thing! Why, he's almost a man!"
"Certainly I can see nothing so very shocking," observed Grayson gently, pursuing the enjoyable grilling of the blushing woman, "in allowing an adolescent son to have the authority of his budding manhood and also the privileges of the childhood which he has not yet relinquished.
"Why should you, or any mother, rush to avoid her own young son's eyes when he chances, in the casual intimacies of the household, to come upon her unclad? Is it not this very insistence upon making a mystery of the maternal body which leads so many youngsters, as the erudite informs us, to uncanny thoughts and aspirations concerning the feminine physique--with especial reference to that of their own mothers?"
"Well, it's-oh, for heaven's sake, can't we change the subject!" cried Marie. "It's certainly not the most palatable of topics for a woman with a boy as big as mine!"
She had come to this morning gathering of congenial spirits upon the beach in the hope of calming turbulent thoughts and recollections of an infinite shame.
Instead she found herself tormented by having those recollections foisted more vividly upon her. Her ability to fence was gone. But still she was quite convinced that her shame was a secret one, as far as all these others were concerned.
She had other causes for huge embarrassment now beside the ones of which these persons, without her knowledge, were aware. She had not been able to face Phillip and persistently avoided him-ever since that preceding morning-and she had no idea how she could ever face him again, since she felt herself incapable of the denunciation which he deserved.
She had considered every possibility-from telling her husband all which had occurred to departing for the north herself-but she found herself strangely, unwontedly incapable of a decision.
Then, too, seated in the midst of her companions, she was aware of a tremendous mortification over the weak and timid way in which she had acted that very morning.
She had at first, designing an emphatic symbol of revolt and indignation, put on for her trip to the beach the frothiest and tiniest of all the scant suits in her bathing wardrobe-a bit of white silk which would have made her unsafe in dropping her mantle until she was quite surrounded by her intimates.
And suddenly she had found herself incapable, she preferred that word to "afraid," of wearing that bathing suit where Phil would almost surely see her. Flushing over her own paltering, she had stripped off the white garment and had put on her present array instead.
Seeing how near to distraction the woman was, the group humored her by chatting of other things. They took their dip in the surf presently. Then, emerging, they held council. Stone-the plump young man who had failed to fathom, when opportunity offered, the gentle, meek, tender perversity of the full bodied, full-blooded Laura Senter-had somehow become lost from the crowd-and not without premeditation on the part of at least some of the others.
For this was the time when they were won't to lay plans for such frivolous recreations as it was not fitting for an outsider to learn about.
Stone's friend-the tall Grayson, who now meant so much to Laura, that she could hardly take big, brown, submissive eyes from him-hovered not far away courteously showing his awareness that he was not yet really an initiate in the view of these others.
But, under lowered lids, he managed to see that the usually quiet and pliable Laura was being very emphatic in the council which was under way.
"Yes-it will be loverly-another dip in the moonlit sea-pagan style and untrammeled by clothing," Laura was saying. "But I mustn't-I mean I shan't-join the party, dearly though I should love it, unless we admit dear Mr. Grayson.
"You all like him, you know you do, and he's as discreet as a mouse and full of fun...."
"You mean you're more than half afraid to come unless we make him a member," said Jack Breedon bluntly. "You'll go off with him instead of us, and we know what will be happening to you-how you'll be weeping, smarting, plunging, ecstatically suffering...."
His fiancee grabbed him by the sleeve, indicating the amazed expression on the face of Marie, to whom all this was a riddle for which an answer must be supplied which would avoid revealing how her own abject subjugation yesterday had started a conflagration.
"They got to tussling after you left us yesterday," said Leila glibly. "Oh, but a regular fight toward the end. And I'm damned if Grayson didn't finally get her down and whack that big behind of hers until she yelped and gave in.
"Of course, she was his from that moment. She needs a master, does the fair Laura, although we thought for a while that a mistress might do," she added, with a glance at the fuming Thalia.
Her great gray eyes lighted with an incredulous shame, Marie Brower was staring at Laura, who, her round cheeks crimson, aimed blows at Leila which the latter easily ducked.
"Do you mean to say," breathed Marie at length, "that Laura is crazy about this man because he maltreated her?"
"Spanked her-spanked her hard-whaled hell out of her!" substituted George mendaciously. "She fairly adored it and him. She was driven half wild with passion!"
"You, oh, you fearful liar!" gasped Laura. "Don't you believe any such horrible thing, Marie!"
"Don't be so terribly ashamed, Laura," urged the fluffy haired Betty, as the humiliated Laura covered a flaming face with her hands. "Lots of girls love to be paddled and to feel a man exercising his strength arbitrarily upon them.
"Listen, to comfort you I'll unveil a family skeleton. We fired a fine, stalwart, efficient chauffeur a while ago at home in New York. Why? Well, my sister Helen is twenty-four-considerably my senior.
"And we found, father did. that she was creeping to the garage at the beck of this Emil and taking a sound beating on her naked backside from the man and then letting him, well, do everything to her except pluck her cherry, which he seemed too wary to be willing to do anyway.
"And after he was discharged, Helen had to be taken abroad to keep her from running off to rejoin her tyrant. I tried to get her to explain to me later on-after I had learned the details which they all tried to hide from me.
And she couldn't.
"All she could say was that-after she had been unreasonably petulant with Emil while he was driving her up into Westchester-they had had a quarrel.
"Finally, he had vowed that no girl could take to him as she had done, job or no job and he had fairly tugged her from the car onto the greensward and had spanked her ignominiously upon her drawers seat.
"She had flown into a raving fit of wildest rage and of threats. Whereupon the fellow had stripped her drawers entirely from her body and had methodically resumed the castigation with a sort of measured cruelty and obvious delight mingled.
"It seemed that presently, hardly knowing it had happened, she found herself no longer crying out her shame and pain and rage, but sobbing quietly and shaken to the very marrow by unutterable sensations of a nature only faintly known to her maidenhood before that time.
"She found herself actually giving her smarting, nude buttocks to the servitor's assault in a sort of delirious pleasure which her intense humiliation seemed only to increase. When he stopped at last, she crumpled up on the ground and sobbed plaintively-twitching from toes to head and fired with a sort of humble adoration for the man.
"I gather that he was well aware now of her nervous plight and of the effect which his brazen deed had had upon her. He caused her-and apparently had no trouble to gain compliance-to kiss him tenderly and admit that she had deserved to be beaten by him.
"He made her rise and show him her reddened and smarting bottom-and then all the rest-for she had to parade before him with her skirt held beneath her arms.
"There was worse than this-I shouldn't tell this, of course-for some of you know Helen, who is now married to that big, husky Bert Porter. But this Emil had her sit with him on the driver's seat until they were nearly home again.
"And he gave her something to hold, something which required the attention at times of both her hands, something huge and wanton and never before more than imagined by my pretty sister.
"Under the lap robe she allowed her hand to be plunged to the wrist within his trousers front. She did not refuse him whatever petting of his swollen virility he demanded-and she admitted going wild with bliss as well as glowing shame over her enforced occupation.
"There were assignations, of course, but Emil's requirements appear at no time to have threatened her violation. He was satisfied to make her go through a rigmarole of verbal submission to his authority-to make her kneel and kiss his naked belly and sex, and apologize for some imaginary fault for which she was going to be punished.
"His little room above the garage was practically sound proof-a fact which shielded the remarkable affair for some weeks-for Helen told me that he always used his hand instead of a rod and that his smacks rang out at times like firecrackers as he spanked her.
"The extent of his unhealthy authority over her was practically unlimited and undoubtedly he could have deflowered her whenever he pleased. She got little meals for him at times-and waited on him at table entirely naked.
"He even made snapshots of her in the most awful positions-showing everything-and these plates and photos were fortunately captured and destroyed when the matter was found out.
"She could not tell me very clearly-although she tried-just what was the terrible, irresistible fascination of his beatings and humiliations. She tried to liken it to a drug to a fearful hunger-to an imperative need of her quivering nerves.
"She knew, of course, the physiology of it-the congestion of blood brought to central, sensitive organs by the chastisement. Yet she realized that there must be something more than this in her own case-that she must have been more or less predestined to be rapturously thrilled by shame and pain when inflicted by a male who pleased her senses.
"Yet she vows that she was actually afraid of the man after that first experience, afraid to cross him in the slightest degree, but delighting in her very fear and apprehension."
Betty stopped to find Laura, her fine features scarlet, hanging, open-eyed and open-mouthed, on every syllable and to note, as the others had already noted, that the lovely flushed face of Marie was turned aside and bowed in apparent deep shame-as if some query which she had been putting to herself had found a most disconcerting answer in the tale of Betty.
There was a heavy, pregnant silence for some seconds. Then, hurrying to avert comments upon a topic gravid with mortifying possibilities for treasured members of the group, Leila said smilingly:
"Well, if nobody else objects, I'm quite willing that Laura should have her man with her for tonight's midnight bath.
"He's very nice, and he's welcome to acquaint himself with my anatomy not that he will care for it much, in view of the plentiful supply of lovely creamy skin which Laura will reveal for his delectation.
"But Laura, darling, when you're all naked in the moonlight with this authoritative creature and for the first time, how can you be sure that he won't drag you to one side where we might all follow and see and take it out on you in a way that will make you cringe and weep?"
"Hush, oh hush!" pleaded Laura, her hands clapped to her ears. With lifted lashes and beaming, soft eyes, she signalled to Grayson, who sauntered toward the group.
"Listen," she said hurriedly, taking the plunge. "We like, now and then, our little coterie, to bathe without anything on. Would such a frivolity appeal to you at all-for tonight at midnight-around that point up yonder?"
"Yes, thank you all very much!" said the man quietly, but with a long look into the brown eyes which drooped before his own.
CHAPTER EIGHT
As it chanced, there were callers in the Brower suite that evening; callers who remained until nearly eleven o'clock.
Marie, who had not heretofore spoken to her son since that world-shaking episode of the previous day, had signalized something like a necessary reconciliation by no longer declining to address him directly.
Her heart-heavy with the wrongs and the shame of such treatment as seemed to have the tang of incestuous flavor, more and more as she looked back upon the incident-had softened involuntarily toward the quiet, curly headed youth whom she loved so tenderly at bottom.
She found herself trying to make excuses for him, and for herself. He couldn't have realized the fearful insult toward her womanhood and her motherhood of which he had been guilty.
And he hadn't at all known that his brutal assault upon her body-indeed she hadn't had the least notion of it herself-could so excite both of them. Their nakedness together, too-the visible arousing of Phil's sex under such provocation-the naked embrace which she thought she could never forget-all this had been terrible, unnatural, but not in the least premeditated or deliberate.
And there were excuses for both of them, she reflected. The flesh is weak and sometimes oblivious of blood relationships obviously; and there had been something filial, after all, in her boy's indignation over her exposure to those alien male eyes and over the pretty licentious attitudes and frolics which had been staged.
Phil was domineering, of course,-and had been unspeakably insolent where he owed respect. But that arrogant trait had come to him from her own blood.
Some day, when they were both calmer, she would have a long talk with him which would result in forgetfulness and forgiveness and a blotting from their minds of what had been particularly shameful in that hour of madness.
She had shown, while the callers were there, a willingness to make the conversation inclusive of her son. Afterwards she went to her own room, but was penned there for a time by the unusually late bedtime for the males of her family.
It was already nearing the hour of twelve, yet she dared not strip and swathe herself in a mantle for her walk up the beach until both her husband and her son were safely tucked away and slumbering. For the Judge might think of some message for her and come to her chamber.
Finally she heard the sounds indicative of their retirement. It was after midnight. She was missing the fun. She would not pause longer for her disrobing, for if she failed to meet the party, who were going elsewhere than the place of assignation for their plunge, she might never find them.
She would have to undress on the shore. She cast a light cloak over her evening wear and tiptoed forth, ashamedly aware that she was positively afraid of being detected, not by her husband but by their son.
Within ten minutes she had joined the already impatient group and was wandering toward a distant spot on the shore, which George Dunham had unearthed recently and recommended as an isolated and fine bathing nook, but which they had not yet visited for that purpose.
George and Leila Dunham, brown-haired Thalia Martin and her dark, slender fiance, John Breedon; pallid, fluffy-haired Betty McAlister, the buxom, auburn-haired Laura Senter and Paul Grayson; all were there.
Arriving at the sheltered and short expanse of white, soft sand, they dropped their cloaks-some of them more than a trifle nervously in spite of similar experiences previously-and stood forth in the clear moonlight utterly naked to each other's eyes.
With nervous, agitated little laughs which they vainly strove to render mirthful, the girls and women greeted the inevitable arising of the flesh which saluted their nudities on the part of the men.
There seemed a strangely pronounced strain, as of overwrought senses and nerves, in the atmosphere this particular night-possibly partly because they had not this time, as heretofore, come fresh from a drinking bout which had given them their previous artificial brazenness.
The charming Thalia had to wrest herself from the instant embrace of her fiance-to endure for a moment, during which she clung passionately to him, the rubbing of his rigid member upon the dark curls above her crotch before she managed to recall the cynicism which was supposed to make these midnight reunions and, laughing hysterically, to push the slender, snowy nudity of Betty into Jack's clutching arms as she herself danced away and rushed for the water.
Looking backward, she saw that the languid, frivolous Betty, her pale cheeks glowing, darted a swift hand to Jack's swollen sex before extricating herself and following Thalia.
Grayson's white teeth were clenched as, with an unusually large member flaunting its agitation, he eyed the magnificent curves and creamy, voluptuous charms of Laura's unveiled body.
He seemed for the instant to have forgotten about the others around. His fingers curling, he was advancing toward the rosy, buxom young wife-who, her eyes large and frightened, was slowly falling back as he advanced.
It was George who intervened. After all, they had come here to bathe and never, up to this occasion, had actual sexual revelry characterized their midnight parties.
He shoved his dark, pretty, elfin wife into the arms of Grayson, intercepting him. From the rear, he caught the shaking Laura in his embrace, taking her by the large, firm breasts and running her playfully into the surf.
With a quick kiss, Leila and Paul followed them.
CHAPTER NINE
Meanwhile, Marie, observant of the small lecheries of the naked crew and tingling sympathetically to them in her own peculiarly agitated state, had stood silently by, still cloaked.
"Hurry in, dearest, why the delay?" caroled Betty, and the rest joined in summoning calls for Marie to join in the frolic.
She let her cloak drop-and, seeing her full clad, her votaries flocked from the surf in curiosity and indignation.
"What's the big idea?" demanded George. "I supposed you were ready for the dip under that cloak, like the rest of us."
"The only way we could get Paul Grayson to come," said Thalia, with a little glance at Laura, "was to let him know he was to have a chance to see you stark bare. Hurry up, sweetness."
"I had no chance-busy with guests," explained Marie. "I really couldn't undress at the hotel. And I'm not going to stand here and strip before all you rowdies either. It's far different from just casting a mantle aside. So you may just pack back into the water and wait for me there."
The voluble aspersions of her friends upon the "prudery" which drew such a fine distinction between a gradual and an immediate revelation of her body failed to move her.
So they retreated-and, frolicking in the shallow surf, splashing each other, indulging in surreptitious fumblings beneath the surface which drew girlish shrieks and protests, the others spared glances for the gradual unveiling of the superb nudity of Marie Brower.
There was something glamorously luscious-especially for the men-about seeing her drop her gown and appear in filmy underwear, with bare, white, exquisite thighs gleaming in the clear moonlight between stockings and step-in.
Still vibrating-as she had been ever since that experience of the previous day-aware somehow of a new element of excitement and fear in her yielding to these shameless cynicisms with this roistering crew-the beautiful Marie yet consented to thrill her friends by the manner of her undressing.
The step-in dropped from her marvelous breasts. She caught it about her navel looking ashamedly about her as if, disrobing in her boudoir, she had heard approaching footsteps. Rosy in the moonlight, the tiny nipples stood stiffly erect upon her bosom.
Very gradually the undergarment descended unveiling the splash of dark color stamped upon the base of her alabaster belly-and it fell at last to her feet. Stepping from the folds-more than ever conscious of the strength of her recently born impulse to excite practical strangers by the most intimate of exposures Marie sat upon the sand facing the gazing young persons of both sexes-to whom, although they were already voluble in their delight, she seemed to pay no attention.
With deliberation she assumed such attitudes in the removal of her pumps and stockings as allowed seductive visions of her most secret nooks to the onlookers-for the moon's rays illuminated her charmingly to the gazers only twenty feet away.
Strangely perhaps, there was no perceptible jealousy of Marie Brower in the bosoms of these other girls and young women. They knew her to be a physical marvel and, although all pretty and well built themselves, they had no thought of assuming to rival her.
In spite of her lascivious condescensions-and in spite of the contrary opinion divulged by Judge Brower to his son-Marie had moved among these others almost like a goddess. Even though perhaps hotter blooded than the other females of the coterie, her yielding to her sensuality had limited themselves to such an exhibition as her present one.
If she consented, as she had occasionally done, to a naked bathing duet with George Dunham or Jack Breedon, those worthies had not been allowed to fondle as they pleased-as they would have done with anyone of the other girls.
Perhaps they had not been able to fascinate her, as the right man might have done-for certainly here was a passionate woman, ripe for an illicit plucking. And yet they were fine chaps-typical of the better class of gilded idlers.
She moved toward them, a naked nymph, now smiling and flushed-allowing Thalia and Leila to kiss her breasts as they grasped and hugged her enthusiastically-not resenting it when male hands petted her white belly or stroked her splendid bottom momentarily.
She laughed when little Betty mischievously grasped the soft hand of Laura Senter and caused it to slap gently at her rump-and then, coloring hotly as she noted several eyes inspecting her buttocks and recalled that it was still somewhat rosy from Phil's maltreatment of the preceding day, she hastily ducked beneath the water, leaving her round, firm twin breasts floating upon the surface.
"Heavens!" Jack dared to comment: "A body'd swear that you'd been well paddled not so long ago, Marie. There's a pink sunrise glowing on your snowy hills."
"Sitting there in the sand must have done that," fibbed the embarrassed woman. "As for spankings-thank you, no-not since I was five years old! Find me the person who would dare even attempt it!"
Concealing little smiles, the others went on to indulge in natatory revels-splashing, dipping, hurling themselves on each other. Then George, with a palm beneath the bellies of Betty and Thalia, gave each a swimming lesson.
Jack Breedon floated on his back-and shrieks of laughter greeted the projection above the water of his goodly standard-whereupon Leila bestrode him as if he had been a white raft, quite submerging him.
Recovering from their simultaneous dip, they shook the water from their faces. He dared her to try to swim with him in that posture. Leila, an expert water woman, mounted him once more-more carefully this time-and, clinging together, they managed to propel themselves for some little distance while thus coupled.
But the movements upon his already swollen virility of the dainty nakedness of Leila so increased the agitation of young Breedon that suddenly he toppled her off from his body.
They disappeared together, only their heads remaining in sight. The dark eyes of the elfin, pretty woman glowed and her cheeks flared with hot blood as the others gathered smilingly again.
But her fingers, busy upon the turgid, seductive monster upon which she had lain while swimming, did not cease their invisible activity-nor did the excited Jack pause in his libidinous caresses of her sex.
Laughing gleefully, George aided Thalia in hauling the almost submerged pair upward, despite their struggles to remain hidden. But so great was their mutual enjoyment now of the lustful pettings they were exchanging, that they did not cease to handle each other's genitals even when their actions became entirely visible to the others.
"Oh, but I beg you," stammered Laura Senter, "not to make an orgy of this party! We've always just bathed before and not done such things as this-"
Her voice trailed off nervously as she caught the excited eyes of both women and men-and Marie, enjoying the sight of the lascivious intermingling which had begun, gave her an almost irate glance.
Paul Grayson was the one who took action against the fair critic, however. He waded toward her, very ominously, and she fell back nervously before him-her big eyes widening.
He caught her, held her-with surrounding arms and with fingers curling vigorously into her great white buttocks like claws. Laura cried out suddenly with a low guttural half sob as her broad, full belly and great firm breasts were squeezed to the body of the man as if she were held in a vise.
She stumbled in her effort to retreat-for it was not thus, in public, that she had visualized the surrender which she must make to Paul.
She fell backward in the shallow water which she had now reached. Paul toppled with her and upon her. But he was on his feet almost instantly, striving to turn the splendid, buxom body over.
Her face scarlet in the moonlight, Laura protested wailingly and struggled against the fearful humiliation which she felt at hand. Now she was upon her belly raising her head and her heavy mantle of hair to keep her face from the water-from which, since it was only inches deep at this point, her snowy mounds of buttocks emerged almost fully.
Still she struggled-pleading now like a child-kicking shapely feet, round calves and full white thighs about in desperation.
"Paul-oh, I beg of you, not here-oh, not here!" she sobbed. "Not where people can see!"
Already the man-entirely oblivious of the searching, interested eyes of all these others-perhaps feeling that he owed them the sight of his complete subjugation of the plump and pretty woman-had raised a hand high in air to deliver a hearty smack upon her soft bottom.
Laura was holding her breath in anguished, shamed, longing apprehension-when there came a sudden diversion which postponed the initial chastisement of the corporation lawyer's spouse by her tyrant.
For suddenly a figure-a boy, who had approached unseen taking advantage of bushes and of hummocks in the sand-was among them. Fully clad, Phillip Brower had plunged into the shallow surf and, with water half way up his thighs, had caught by the wet and naked arm a feminine figure standing somewhat aloof from the others and yet watching with rosy-cheeked avidity the doings of Paul Grayson with his prey.
It was the turn of Marie Brower to utter a smothered cry of amazement, fright, confusion and wrath mingled. Kicking and resisting, she fell into the water-and was practically dragged ashore by her silent, flushed son.
Like a pettish, but scared child, she lay now just where the ripples ran up on the sand. Emphatically, the youth jerked her to her feet and held her there when she would have let herself drop again.
The quivering lips of the wretchedly humiliated and unspeakably wrathful young mother had already opened for the flood of wild rebukes and orders and threats which surged tumultuously to them-but when she saw the drawn, determined, ominous countenance of her son in the clear light, the whole verbal cataclysm fell away into a single moan of frightened apprehension.
"Get your clothes and come with me, mother," said Phil, with a quiet which contrasted with all his tense attitude and expression. The others, hearing, ventured no nearer, but they were immovable, tingling with a lecherous interest, as they saw the dripping boy hold his nude, quivering mother thus and utter the crispiest of commands.
Not even Laura, flattened for a condign and disgraceful fate in public-not even Paul, on his knees to administer that fate, but his lifted hand slowly falling to his side moved in the least.
There was a world of mingled emotions-bitter shame, reproach, pleading, threat and appeal-in the one stifled word which Marie uttered.
"Phillip!" she cried, and, in sudden desperate contortions, she managed so far to escape his grasp upon her two arms as to fall to her knees. Unwilling to drag her further, the boy let his Niagara of suppressed, un-filial but moral indignation so far overflow that he hauled her upward once more and bound her waist beneath his strong left arm.
Face downward, struggling with entire futility, kicking out lavishly with her small naked feet, Marie Brower received a round half dozen of ringing slaps upon her fully presented buttocks-and her remarks thereon consisted solely of sobbing outcries of unspeakable shame and humiliation.
Roughly she was put upon her feet once more. Almost demented as she was, she could only sob and try to cover her flaming lovely face with her hands-an undertaking which failed for the reason that Phil held both her biceps in a grip of steel.
"Good God, did you see him flay her backside, his own mother!" gasped George.
"And she's standing for it-but, then, what can she do!" whispered little Betty. Hugely moved, she was rubbing her tense little nipples against the broad bare back of George-and now she reached a furtively licentious hand about him to take his standing tool and softly rub it.
Nor did she pause even when she discovered that, from the other side, his wife was similarly caressing him.
"Oh-oh, how it excites me!" almost wailed Thalia. "It's so unnatural-so wonderful-so delicious somehow!
I suppose nobody in the world was ever so frightfully ashamed as poor dear, proud Marie is this moment!
"She's almost fainting, I should think! I wish-Jack, I wish-he'd go on and give her a real thrashing!"
"Cruel little creature!" whispered her fiance, handling her own trim breasts delightedly and letting a hand slip to her crotch.
"He will, never fear, although we may never see it. For he's got her where he wants her-see how submissively she walks off by his side now-and, although he thinks he's on a moral crusade, we could tell yesterday, when they were in the cabin, how wild with lust it made him to punish her.
"He will lie with her-he will possess her-mother or no mother-and very soon, too. It's inevitable, I should say-for we know how hot she got when he whipped her before. Listen darling let me come to your room tonight after we get back to the hotel, won't you?"
"Oh, Jack-we were going to be good until after we are married," half wailed his fiancee. "We were going to-to save it-but I do feel so very passionate tonight after all this!" she breathed.
"We'll just sleep together all naked," he reassured her.
"You know what will surely happen," mourned the girl, but longingly. "Yet-come, dearest-aunt will be asleep-and you can come by the balcony-and we'll try awfully hard to be satisfied with just petting-"
"Watch, watch!" murmured Jack. "He's at it again!"
Up by the little stack of Marie's discarded clothing another scene was being staged. And this one was still more violent.
Phil was heard to order his mother to pick up her clothes and the frenzied woman, foaming with shame over this added humiliation since he did not at all lower his voice and the spectators were not more than forty feet away, grated her white teeth and stiffened into rebellion once more.
"Oh, when I get you in private-foul, unnatural wretch-brute!" she managed to ejaculate hoarsely.
Her words died away in another shriek-for once more she was in penitential attitude. Sinking to the sand, Phillip drew her by the ankles-and, as she fell, he hauled her over his thighs.
Lying helplessly upon her face over his drenched trouser legs-receiving blows upon her buttocks which smarted intolerably now-Marie panted and strained and wept but endured a full dozen of ringing smacks.
Still she was detained there after he had finished, and the eager listeners heard low voiced, inaudible, but imperative demands from the lad-rasping and horrified refusals from the woman. Phil raised his punitive hand. Two more slaps rang out. There was a gasp from Marie's lips-which sounded like an assent.
He released her-and now the auditors and spectators found out what was the disgraceful order which she had to obey. For the weeping woman plucked her clothing from the sand. She advanced to the edge of the surf-tears streaming down her shamed face-beautiful, her marvelous body gleaming in the clear light and she managed to say sobbingly:
"Good night, everybody. I must go back to the hotel with my son now."
CHAPTER TEN
A few mechanical, choked responses to her enforced salutation arose, but every eye followed her as she turned and, still stark naked and carrying her clothing, trudged off by the side of the boy.
"And what she's going to get, will be plenty!" observed Jack, the first to speak aloud for many a minute.
"If we could only, only see!" cried Leila longingly. "If the father is asleep I'll bet it will be quite everything which the little beauty will get from her fine son-don't you, George?"
"I, well, I hardly think so," replied her spouse. "This arbitrary kid is such a moralist-in spite of getting wild when he spanks his mother's bottom and sees her unclad-that I doubt whether he'd ever venture...."
"Nobody was ever more miserable than Marie is now," said the scarlet flushed Thalia. "But I'll wager nobody was ever more ecstatically happy than she's going to be very soon. For we know that no shame prevents her from getting crazy with lust when her boy spanks her-and she'll give in to him in every possible way-after she's had one more dose from his palm!"
"Let's be frank-and not blame either of them a lot if that does happen," murmured Leila. "He's a gloriously tempting boy-of whom any mother would be proud and Marie, despite her aristocratic pride, turns out to have a considerable trace of the instinct which our dear Laura possesses in such generous quantities."
With the word, everybody in the group turned to look at the absorbed girl still lying in the shallow surf some yards away.
So quiet were the spectators that neither the infatuated Laura nor the tall, silent, peremptory man who had so inflamed her imagination, seemed to observe them in the least.
The agitated breathing of the plump shapely young woman could be heard as, rolling in the shallow water, she obeyed inaudible commands from Paul Grayson and gave him for the inspection of his eyes and fingers whatever part of her creamy skinned anatomy he desired.
She gasped now at one disgraceful order-and then, visibly pinched by cruel and nervous fingers in the plumpest part of her body, her squeal of pain was heard and, scrambling to hands and knees, she opened her buttocks with her own hands and let him view and finger all the rut between the hillocks, the tiny rear aperture and also the throbbing, rosy portals of her sex.
The great rod of the man was a column of rigid white capped with pink. He dared a disgraceful catechism in a mutter which reached the ears which were straining to hear.
"Would you like me to mount you now, Laura?" he queried. "Shall I stab you to the quick here in the surf and the moonlight?"
"Oh, oh my God, Paul-no, no, no-for God's sake-they are all looking and listening!" cried the woman, turning dazed, but glowing eyes on the silent gallery.
"Don't worry" frothed Grayson. "When I lie on your lovely, soft belly and make you groan with ecstasy, it will be after I have turned your big bottom so red and smarting that you will be weeping with pain as well as bliss while you roll upon it!
"I think that I shall thrash you well right now, for your vicious enjoyment of what happened to Marie Brower!" Already Laura was panting with shame-her turbulent breathing merging into sobs-as she gave unavailing battle to keep from being turned again upon her belly. Frantically she pleaded in audible gasps to be spared.
"Oh God-Paul-Paul, darling-I beg of you-I humbly beg of you; don't beat me with these others looking on! I, I haven't done anything, I'll apologize for watching Marie-God-they're smiling, laughing at me!"
"Well," rasped Paul. "I'll spare you now-on one condition-and you shall catch it doubly tomorrow when I drive you off into the countryside somewhere."
With lips near her ear, he made his demand-and a choking cry of intolerable shame broke from the mouth of Lama. Flat on her belly, with Grayson's knee bearing heavily upon her well cushioned back and maintaining her helplessly immovable, she was heard to beg brokenly for forbearance.
"It's that-just as a sign of affection and docility-as a trifling punishment, if you will-as a visible pledge that you will soon make me happy in any way I wish-or else it's such a spanking that I shall have to carry you back to the hotel afterwards and put you to bed!" threatened Paul.
Already, as Lama buried her face in her hands and remained motionless, he had raised his palm and dashed it downward on the wet backside. She cried out in pain and humiliation as each white dome received a hard slap.
Then, as he removed his knee from her back, she writhed upon her side and toward him. To the affected horror but actual delight of Betty and Thalia-and to the licentious agitation of the rest of the onlookers-she opened red lips and engulfed in her warm mouth for an instant the rosy knob of Paul's member.
Then, sobbing, frenzied with shame over what she had done-for the first time in her life and under gazing eyes which seemed to bum her-she scrambled up to her feet and, stumbling and gasping, she dashed from the brine and made off blindly, stark naked, over the sand.
She had no notion where she was going-hardly any other idea in her whirling head-except that she could never, never look in the face any of these persons who had seen her so degrade herself. But silent footsteps sped at her heels. With a wail she stumbled and fell as Paul grasped her shoulder.
The man picked her up-and, with muscles of steel, he hoisted the great, dripping, beautiful body over his shoulder like a sack of meal. He carried his sighing, panting burden to the verge of the water where all the others of the party were gathered in flushed, staring excitement.
"You liked it!" he said brusquely. "The taste and the feel of my tool between your lips delighted you. You hope to suck me many, many times in the near future! Isn't that so-curse you, you lovely soft creature! Tell our friends that it is true!"
Holding her beneath the armpits, he shook her gently the threat of a whirlwind in his gestures and expression.
"Yes, oh yes!" sobbed the almost demented Laura jerkily. "Yes, I loved it. I shall suck your prick when you wish, my dearest!"
Shaking with shame she tottered as he released her. Yet the moment afterwards-still refusing to raise her crimson face to the gaze of the circle-she was hugging him with passionate joy as he drew her into his arms with a peculiar tenderness which bespoke not at all the tyrant which he had shown himself capable of being.
Suddenly she lifted her flaming face from the hairy chest where she had concealed it. With an almost delirious cry, she slipped to her knees-and she crowned her shame and her fascinated yearning by taking the scepter of the man's virility in both her hands and kissed and licked it from end to end.
Her splendid, firm breasts heaved wildly and she sighed stertorously as she grasped the white standard in both her hands and let her tongue play upon its gleaming knob. And then-suddenly she choked back a gasping exclamation-gagging herself by surrounding the head of the man's member with the soft ring of her parted lips and slowly advancing them to absorb it.
"Oh God!" half wailed Betty. "This is the girl who was imploring us not to let our bathing party lapse into an orgy! What, oh what, shall I do?" inquired the inflamed maiden naively.
And suddenly, she sank crouchingly upon the sand, and, her eyes glued to the tableau formed by Laura and Paul, she began shamelessly to run a dainty forefinger into the rosy cleft which her slender, delicate, parted legs unveiled to whoever might care to see.
But suddenly she cried out, half in fright and half in petulance, as her libidinous occupation was halted by the rush of a lithe and sturdy girlish body.
Thalia, robbed of the womanly mount which she had gained through her sensual conquest of Laura during their school days together and which she had been accustomed occasionally to enjoy more recently-to the intense shame of the pliable Laura, who was designed by nature to be the prey of a male only, had become so overwrought that she, too, no longer hesitated to make public parade of her lust.
Overbearing the blonde Betty, she flattened her slender body upon the sand face upwards. Holding the slighter maiden firmly, she bestrode her and rubbed her throbbing cleft upon the hard, small breasts, upon the white, flat belly.
"I, I'll rape you, baby!" she cried. "Lie still, still, or I swear I'll get Phil when we get back to the hotel and I'll bring him to your chamber to flog you! Give me that tiny yellow beard-that wee pink slit-hug me with your legs and arms! I'll show you whether a girl can screw you or not!"
The brown, heavy foliage of Thalia's sex mingled with the lighter florescence of Betty's genitals as the larger girl settled upon the surprised but hardly revolting body.
With firm pressure-then with sweeping, almost imperceptible movements upon the tiny mound and the expanded cleft as Betty's slim legs went about her-Thalia gave her fiance and all the others, full cognizance of the perverse pastime with which she managed to find a certain relief for her exuberant passion during school days.
Entirely enamored of the charming Thalia-deeply a sensualist himself-Jack Breedon feasted on the scene as George and Leila were doing-sharing their glances between this episode and the spot where Laura was still tenderly, lasciviously heeding the panted directions of Paul Grayson as he taught her how to gratify him expertly and to assuage her own new born passion for a lecherous caress.
Already Jack and the others had had evidence of the manner in which Thalia was accustomed to enjoy Laura at times-for they had not forgotten a certain scene upon the beach. Jack had then had mental pictures of a possible future scene, in which his bride should bring Laura to their chamber and cause the latter to accept Jack's embraces upon the nuptial couch.
That possibility had flown with the entire succumbing of Laura to the masculine approaches of Paul. But there was this new speculation now, it might be the virgin flapper, Betty, who would make a third in their bed, perhaps on their very marriage night.
Frantic with lust over the thought of this perverse possibility, Jack approached his bride to be. Taking both the naked girls about the body, he pressed his swollen organ between the heaving buttocks of his fiancee, and he rubbed it there in the warm, silken groove while Thalia, gasping with lecherous joy, revelled and sandwiched in her dual occupation.
It was all too much for the Dunhams to endure in an activity confined to their eyes. Suddenly George rushed upon his inflamed wife. Coiling as if by instinct into an abnormal posture, they revealed a marital habit, which, while not exceptional, is very seldom put so frankly on view.
Stretched upon his back, George took the wee feminine crevice of Leila with ardent lips and probing tongue-and the youthful wife, mounted upon him with head towards his feet, swallowed as much as her mouth could contain of his stiff pecker and, sighing with delight, she kept the gloriously happy Laura in countenance by sucking avidly upon it.
To be sure, Laura did not see what was going on about her-for she was so utterly given over to this new and fascinating lechery that she was as if alone with Paul in an otherwise uninhabited universe.
But her lover and master-who had sunk to the sand, unable to stand erect longer in his felicity-described to her in quavering whispers what was going on about them.
Still she did not pause to look until he took her face in his hands and compelled her to turn and glance at the libidinous actions going on about them-and the instant he freed her cheeks she returned with eager rapture to her lowly and ineffable caress of his person.
Paul had reached the boiling point. Foaming with lust, he felt the first jet of his sap shoot forth. Apprehensive of a revolt now, he hurriedly clutched the head of Laura and maintained it in position, whispering husky adjurations to her.
She moaned feebly in burning shame as her tongue was drenched and as she heard his command, but instantly she was softly sucking once more draining down her working throat every drop of the semen which squirted forth from the throbbing rod.
As he sank back, prostrated with bliss for the instant, Laura slowly released the man's member from its luxurious prison. With the tip of a rosy tongue she licked a final drop or two from the wee mouth in its tip. Then she fell forward and buried a crimson face upon his belly.
As low cries arose from the triangular heap of flesh formed by Betty and Thalia and Jack, Paul half arose. He raised the head of Laura, too, and together they saw the white bodies of the two girls writhe in a fury of spending as Thalia swiftly swept the crisp grove of her dark genital adornment between the expanded thighs of the smaller girl.
Betty-oddly humiliated now as she realized that she had been thus perversely possessed by a girl, and before many eyes-would have extricated herself from this posture as her emission ceased. But Thalia-bowed forward! under the weight of her fiance and hearing him gasp as he rubbed more forcibly his tense organ in its velvet sheath between her buttocks-would not allow any disarrangement of the group until her Jack had had his pleasure.
Suddenly her bottom, the lower portion, too, of her back, was drenched with the jets of her fiance's dew and, clasping Betty firmly, she shivered with pleasure under this remarkable baptism.
Untangled at last, the three joined Paul and Laura in devouring with their eyes die scene proffered by Leila and her blonde husband. They had ceased their lingual and oral caresses, which had obviously been merely a curtain raiser on this occasion, and now they were giving their companions the marvelous spectacle of the fieriest of marital copulations.
That they were thus lifting the curtain from their alcove-making of an almost sacred rite, a vicious public display-seemed only to excite them the more as they plunged and writhed in their coupled nakedness.
"Well, at any rate, we were the only ones not carried away by the contagion of a frightful fever upon this shore this night," said Leila, with a mischievous primness, ten minutes later, as, after a brisk towelling of their bodies, the party donned their robes once more.
"Everything else which happened was illicit and terrible-marvelous and beautiful-but nevertheless terrible! George and I will show you all the marriage license which made our action perfectly proper. Yet..
She laughed.
"Yet I shall seldom tell my grandchildren, I think, that their father, or mother, as the case may prove to be, was probably conceived on a beach and under the eyes of half a dozen persons!"
"As bad as that?" queried her husband, with a shade of anxiety in his tone.
"Yes, kind sir, and thank you for your courteous inquiry," smiled his wife, dipping in a bow. "I never went so nearly crazy in all my life before-and I'll lay you ten to one in magnums that our first born is now on his way. And I don't care-and you mustn't care either."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The willful, capricious Marie, her head whirling, felt certain-as she trudged stark naked by her son's side over the moonlit sand, with her bottom pink from his blows that she had plumbed this night the furthermost depths of misery and shame.
Not thus meekly, she believed, would she have gone with him at his command-not even though he smacked and thrashed her for an horn-if it had not been for the fact that she could not bear to face the companions among whom she had so long queened it after they had seen her so degradingly punished for an indiscretion by her own son. She felt that she must flee from them.
And yet, wracked with shame and distress though she was, she was suddenly aware that her dominant feeling was what amounted to a genuine awe and fear of her stalwart, handsome son.
The volcanic wrath with which she had encountered his obvious campaign to control her morals and her behavior to prevent her from making herself common and vulgar with these hoydens and roisterers of notable families.
This wrath appeared wraith-like, evanescent, even now when she tried to regain it as something palpable to which to cling in the midst of her toppling world.
She tried to tell herself that she was foaming inwardly with rage, that she could be contemptuously silent now, dignifiedly aloof, in face of Phillip's brutal and abnormal assumption of dictatorial and punitive rights over his own mother-but that he should atone bitterly-in ways which she found it difficult, nay impossible, to outline clearly just now, in this time of her tremendous distress.
Certainly, for one thing, he had lost his mother forever, this unspeakable boy-who would not even let her put on her clothing before trudging with him towards the hotel.
She would leave him-leave his father-that gentle but outworn man-whose own weakness, she now felt, had turned her towards companionships and ways of life whose unworthiness she recognized.
She would take her daughters, her children-ah, God-her children, but wasn't this drenched boy by her side one of them-yes-and the best beloved!
Yet this curly headed lad was quite suddenly a monster; a wretch who actually beat her and made her do as he pleased instead of following her own heretofore unbridled will!
And she was following him about, quite naked, shrinking with a queer, agitated apprehension whenever he turned the least bit toward her-and-God in -passion for him!
She could have rolled upon the sand at his feet-if she hadn't felt compelled to this disgraceful promenade by his command-a very perilous promenade, too, for they were now nearing the hotel region and late wayfarers might readily catch sight of her nudity, gilded by the moon's rays.
Her head clearing somewhat, she reasoned that it was just a temporary aberration which she was undergoing-that it was just because she had been so fearfully upset and agitated and because Phil chanced to be now the male who was with her that she felt as she was conscious of feeling.
She had been smitten in her flesh, raped naked from her comrades like a Sabine woman of old-and how could she expect to feel calm under such circumstances? No, she was insane for the moment, but tomorrow this lad would be just her son again-but, oh, what a shameful tyrant of a son-whose relations with her would need lots of thought and care and mutual apologies!
Nervously she halted in her tracks-for already the lights which still blazed here and there in the great hotel were upon them. She was aware, as Phil turned upon her, . that she was dumbly holding out toward him the clothing she carried, as if to ask permission to attire herself.
They faced each other for a full minute, and the boy saw the beauty of his mother as, it seemed to him, he had never seen it before. The glorious, firm breasts with their tiny pink projections-the triangular splash of colorful tendrils which ornamented the lovely belly at its base-the palpitation and agitation of all this wondrous femininity-all the blessed nudity of this marvelous womanhood which had given him birth-a shamed, unconscious questing, which a more experienced male might have read and interpreted, in the gray eyes which were presently veiled-all these things smote him as with a blow.
And, strangely perhaps, it was not only with love for his mother and wordless rejoicing in her beauty but with renewed and actual rage that she should have given this beauty in pasturage for alien eyes that he was tom.
As he grasped her by the arm once more and turned her toward the little isolated bath cabin, now near at hand, where he had taken her the day previous, her long lashes were raised-and she panted suddenly with anguished fear and shame and apprehension as she saw the re-aroused wrath in Phil's glance.
She hung back, sighing plaintively-and then sighed heavily as he suddenly kissed her, almost roughly, upon the lips. And then she found herself not hanging back at all, but hurrying by his side toward the cabin, with his arm about her waist.
And yet the boy was muttering things which made her quake with fear even while she accompanied him, entranced, unable to oppose him.
"Stripping naked before all those debauchees!" he rasped. "Letting those men pat your belly and feel your bottom-yes, and touch your breasts too! I saw-damn them all! I saw you let them look between your legs while you drew off your stockings!
"As far as I am concerned, they can all act like beasts together, but you-no!"
Yet it was not until she had preceded the boy into the open door of the tiny hut that Marie fully realized that she had been taken there not to be kissed, perhaps, and hugged and to become forgivingly reconciled with her son, but to undergo the most ignoble and ignominious of chastisements at his hands.
Already she was answering his accusations with the meekest of admissions, with lowly murmurings, instead of with the arrogant outbursts of an outraged motherhood.
"Yes, Phil-I did-I did all those things and I'm terribly sorry. I must have been mad! You must forgive your poor, distracted mother-almost without companionship down here-and letting herself be drawn...."
She was kissing him-trying to hug him-feeling him shiver suddenly in his drenched clothing. The maternal in her was awakened.
"My God, you'll catch a terrible cold, pneumonia perhaps!" she cried in genuine alarm. "An hour or two in these wet clothes-for, though the air is warm, you've become chilled.
"Take them off instantly-and I'll rub you down, as I used to do when you were quite a little chap. Heavens!" she laughed hysterically, feverishly. "Who would ever have thought that I'd be giving you the same attention when you were sixteen-and I myself clad like this."
Phillip, who really was shivering and chilly in the wet attire, found himself following the childhood custom of compliance. Naked as was his mother, he stood there in the half light which came through the opened door.
Marie touched his brawny young back, his flat, sturdy belly-and cried out at the damp chill of his skin. She clutched the still dry towel which she had carried for her own use, but which she had not been permitted to employ, the night air drying her skin as Phil hurried her from the shore and she briskly rubbed the white body of the boy.
Then, with small hands, she made sure that his thighs, his stomach were no longer moist-that the blood was beginning to warm his skin.
And now it was she who shivered, but not with cold, as she felt the sheer satin of the boyish body and saw with dazed eyes the drooping, pendant tube at his crotch stretch and grow and stiffen as her fingers alighted and gently rubbed in its neighborhood.
"Don't forget," she dared to whisper, with a nervous trill of laughter, "that's no business here. It's only your mother who is here-and, because she is undressed and unrecognizable, this thing mistakes her for some girl.
"I-oh, Phil, oh-how very hard it is-and how long! When I used to touch it, laughing to see you squirm and smile, when you were a baby, it was the tiniest of objects-a wee, white worm. Now it is...."
Covering her audacity beneath another quavering laugh, she gratified an overwhelming impulse by suddenly coiling her fingers about the now rigid member.
"It's bigger, harder, than any of those full grown men in the bathing party possesses!" she whispered. "Certainly your own mother is entitled to know how her son has developed."
But her reminiscence and her flattering comparison were unfortunate as it turned out. For Phil-shaken, yielding to a white flame which overran his nerves as his beautiful mother lusciously caressed him, bending to kiss her naked shoulders-was instantly grinding his teeth in wrath.
"You've touched them, then-you've-you've handled them when they were stiff-else, how do you know they are less hard than mine. God, how do you expect me to stand for that, mother!
"You shall have it-the spanking which your father and my father ought to have given you frequently to teach you to keep away from ignoble creatures. I know how to break the spell which had bound you-and I'm going to do it, too!"
"I didn't ever, ever-touch them!" panted his mother, trembling as he grasped her imperiously by the arms. "Even when they asked me-begged me for-all sorts of things-I always refused!"
"You went in swimming, all naked, with just one male companion-often!" accused Phil, tightening his irate grip upon her soft flesh.
"Yes," confessed his mother. "But I never gave them further privileges-except just a hug or two and maybe a kiss...."
"A hug!" rasped the boy. "And you ask me to believe that you were naked-in a naked man's arms-alone at night-and didn't give yourself further, like a hussy!"
He shook her violently.
"Never, never!" she gasped as he ceased his motions.
"I've told you the truth-all the truth. And how dare you use further violence upon me!" she queried, with gathering wrath.
"Twice already you have disgraced me so before those pleasant natured and well-bred, even if frivolous, persons that now I'm going to run away from them-and from you.
"And I tell you that-though I was forgiving you on the ground that you were practically demented each time-if you lay so much as a finger upon me again in violence, you will have lost your mother forever! Good God, to whip me like a child as if I must do whatever you say instead of what I like!"
But she interrupted herself, with a cry of alarm, as he reached for her waist with an inflexible purpose which was apparent in his eyes. Wheeling, she dashed from the cabin-but was caught and grounded upon the white, soft sand before she had gone twenty feet.
Writhing, twisting, she was inexorably planted upon her belly. And her son had bestridden her back with his face toward her feet and was bearing her flat with his hard rump and with his hands upon her buttocks and thighs.
Marie gave one cry of desperation as she realized the imminence of the castigation-and then shrank in scared silence as she saw moving figures outlined in some of the lighted windows of the hotel hardly fifty yards away.
"They will hear you and come," said Phillip. "If you want that-why, just scream all you like!"
In silent desperation, she struggled again-and she felt how her satin back writhed against his dangling sack and his swollen, excited penis-how his fingers sank into the soft flesh of her bottom.
She subsided, tom with varying emotions-in which anger seemed no longer to play the prominent part-and, sobbing already, gave way to the boy's will.
As if the amorous delight which had already run like a golden thread through the dark woof of Phil's youthful and un-filial urge to straighten out his family and to apply punitive justice, had somehow tutored him to make this first prolonged punishment of his mother a gradual stimulant to his own senses.
And only incidentally to hers, he began to smack the splendid bottom beneath his eyes quite gently, almost caressingly. Marie's sobs grew fainter and soft, irrepressible sighs arose from her lips to the boy's ears.
He saw the pink tinged whiteness of her lovely rear mounds move uneasily, seem to be raised toward his hand as it descended with somewhat increased severity.
The womanly buttocks appeared to have a certain life of their own now-quivering perceptibly beneath the palm and fingers which he occasionally rested upon the warm heaps before raising his arm again.
Still he maintained a certain rein over his blows, and suddenly he caught a prolonged, gasping "Oh-o-o-oh" from his mother's lips. Her silken back was raised and was rubbing softly upon the long, hard tube which oppressed it-her bottom was raised high and lowered again several times in sequence.
"Darling, d-darling Phil, my own s-son," murmured the prone woman brokenly. "If you simply must spank your bad, naughty mother-p-please d-don't hit so very, very hard!"
And suddenly the lad realized-as if full confession of the fact had been made-that the same mad delight with which he was chastising this exquisite flesh was shared by his mother-that she was trembling with a morbid joy in being thus treated by her own offspring-and that she was actually longing to feel more vividly the pain and smarting of his blows.
His own bewildered rapture increased hugely by this amazing discovery, Phil graduated upward the severity of his smacks. His senses almost in a delirium now, he perversely rubbed his Swollen member upon her body while he delivered blows which presently resounded so loudly that there was a risk of their being overheard even from the hotel.
And Marie, quivering in every nerve and fiber as the hot blood tingled in her secret nook, groaned softly in ever increasing pleasure. Dimly she perceived the pain of each smack-but very vividly the bliss which came at its heels.
She was wild now with lust, lifting her smooth back for the pressures of her son's tool, raising her now scarlet buttocks for each thudding blow, casting her naked limbs about feverishly and letting the bending youth have the dainty vision of her excited, coral-lipped sex.
Suddenly the blows ceased. Phil lay forward upon her. She felt his young spear upon her vibrating loins-the touch of his finger upon the delicate lips between her widely flung legs.
She cried out dully in a yearning, an imperative need too deep, too terrible, for words. She heard the boy's teeth grind-and then, gurgling rapturously, incapable of an audible word, she felt her son's warm lips fall upon her most secret nook in the most torrid of kisses.
A torrent of the same caresses fell now upon all her burning, scarlet backside-upon her widespread thighs. And then, wildly happy, marveling at the heaven which had come upon her, the woman yielded in blissful lucidity to imperious hands which twisted and turned her into every conceivable posture-to hot and impassioned young lips which devoured her breasts, her belly, her genitals with kisses of flame.
Trembling like a leaf, moaning with desire, she took her son's neck with round arms as he raised his head-and, weeping with hysterical delight, she almost smothered him with kisses.
She licked his face-so crazed that she hardly knew what she was doing-and suddenly she flattened herself upon her back and drew him upon her body, between her thighs.
"I'll be your girl-your sweetheart-your lover-your anything!" she gasped. "But always your mother, your wicked mother, whom you have to beat now and then to keep her from bad ways. Take me, Phil. Oh God, tell me, darling, have you ever lain with a woman?"
"Never, mother dearest!" whispered the lad.
"Thank-oh, thank God!" panted Marie. "I am wild to be the first-the very first-to yield to you! And it's the virginity of more than a year which I bring to you-ever since your father became too weak-oh-I could die with joy!
"Let me take it, beloved son-and put it at the entrance. There-now press inward-very slowly. Wait, let me slip my legs about your loins and put my feet on your back. O-o-h!"
"What is it, mother, do I hurt you?" questioned the lad as, twisting beneath him, she moaned faintly.
"No, dearest one, no, precious," she whispered. "It's just my smarting bottom-on the sand-but now I hardly feel it. How you did smack me! Shall you do it often? I must be very careful how I act hereafter-not to incur your displeasure, but, darling, it made me mad with desire for you-to have you spanking my naked buttocks!"
"Brute, beloved brute, you shall do as you like with me always! Oh God, Phil, the whole head is in-how big, how very big-your father could never stretch me this way!"
And so, if his mother lost the virginity of a year, Phil lost the virginity of a brief lifetime. And to very few does it come to be devirginized in such a tumult of ecstasy-upon and within so gloriously beautiful a woman.
Prostrated with such rapture as she had never before known, Marie lay shaking upon the sand, her exquisite face pallid, for some moments after their juices had mingled in her body. Her son, hugging her gently and tenderly, manifested very soon a new desire-and the woman, amazed to find that his virile young member was already tense again against her flank, was so moved to give both him and herself a new ride to paradise that it required the harassing thought of the danger of a possible impregnation to bring her to rise and repulse him.
Unaware of the cause of her refusal, her son was insistent-going so far as to twist her about and raise his hand threateningly above her already flaming backside.
In breathless whispers, she explained to him the utter necessity of her going to the hotel for ablutions.
"You may beat me, of course, angel, if you wish," she said smilingly. "What can I do against you, horrid, beloved son! But I am very sore and you certainly cannot want me to be marked for days.
"Nor can you wish me to have to explain to your father-who still adores my naked body even though he cannot make any particular use of it-why it is that my stomach seems to be getting plumper-in a few weeks from now."
Phil listened to the irrefutable reasoning-and lifted her to her feet. At each stage of her hurried dressing-for he must have her bathrobe for his own return, since his attire was soaked-there were fresh kisses-and glorious toying of her soft fingers with her son's swollen member.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Since Phillip had no notion of leaving Palm Beach until the very end of his vacation-and since she could not now bear the thought of being separated from the boy until it was necessary, even if she could have brought him to consent to her departure-it became requisite for Marie to face the endurance of a Calvary of shame by meeting again and mingling with the group which had witnessed her unspeakable subjugation by her son and the first stages of her chastisement.
For Phil did not demand that she avoid her friends-which would have been next to impossible. Indeed, he seemed to wish that she go on with them as before-but with the observance of the ordinary decencies upon at least her own part.
"They're jolly, excellent people at bottom," he went so far as to admit. "But a woman of your standing and fineness and intelligence cannot, of course, act as they do; no matter how glad they are to have her with them."
"I don't know how I can ever face them-and listen to their comments," murmured his mother nervously, squeezing her ripe, red lower lip with delicate fingertips-a way she had when highly agitated.
"Just think, Phillip-they saw you drag me from the water all naked-and beat me-and make me say good night to them like a child-and then go off with you toward a fate which they couldn't fail to guess, at least ... " And she blushed hotly.
"At least as far as being thrashed by my own arrogant son was concerned. If they guessed the rest I should surely die!"
After a feeble flurry of resistance-she was in nightgown and kimono at the time-she gave him the lovely twins of her bosom for which he was reaching.
Perching upon her lap-a massive burden for her soft thighs-he sucked gently the stiff pink tips of her breasts-and his mother quivered visibly, with naked arms about his neck.
"As for that," said the lad, raising his head. "It's certain that that was not the first time they had seen me whack your splendid bottom. For that very first morning, when we were in the bathhouse, they had sneaked up to listen and to watch. I could see eyes at some of the broad cracks to the rear of the cabin."
"Oh my God!" cried Marie. "Then they knew all the time-when I faced them the next day and told fibs about it all! Oh, how they were laughing at me inwardly! The wretches, the rascals, the spies!"
"It's no very great matter, is it, mother?" observed the youth, as he ran happy hands down beneath the nighty upon a bare belly of snowy satin. "You know lots of things about them, no doubt.
"And, besides, they must have been quite well aware at heart that-in spite of being older than they, although looking of their age-you were being just a kind of naughty girl.
"And naughty girls have to be controlled-and if they have no father or mother to take them in hand, some one else who loves them must do so. You hardly look a minute older than the elder sister of my school chum, Tom Barrows-and she's nineteen-and Tom tells me that their father still takes her to her room when she has displeased him and whips her on the bare legs and bottom with a stinging lash.
"Tom manages to make Lily, that's her name, show him her body and all the rosy stripes after she has been flogged-and she's afraid to refuse because he threatens to tell her friends about it in case she declines.
"He loves to look at her carefully-and feel how warm her behind is if she's been spanked, as sometimes happens-and he tries to get at her while she's still weeping with pain and shame from the beating."
"Does he lie on her?" queried his mother, with averted face.
"No. I doubt if he's ever had the idea," said Phil. "And as for Lily, she weeps afresh with mortification over having to show him her naked body-quite everywhere-for often he makes her strip entirely nude.
"He gets tremendously hot, he told me-but he never even undresses-or does anything except look and touch. He's only fifteen. But he's certainly got his big sister buffaloed-because she's so terribly afraid of having it get out that, at nineteen, she is still chastised by her father."
"I wonder," mused Marie, "whether it wasn't from Tom's terrible tales that you got the incredible notion of treating your own mother like that?"
"Oh, no, mother, it was just that, well, you seemed to deserve it-and I couldn't think what else to do. It had to be something which would shock you awfully!" remarked Phillip naively.
"Well, congratulate yourself that you found 'something which would shock me awfully,' " mimicked his mother, smiling and blushing. "I can hardly believe it even yet! Is there another young tyrant like you anywhere on earth?" And, as his wandering hand strayed, beneath the nightgown, amid the silken grove of her genitals, Marie caught his head to her naked breasts and hugged him passionately.
She grudged now each hour, each minute when he was out of her sight; and yet, head high, she managed to go amid her wanton coterie-facing the ordeal in a way which brought outspoken admiration and endeared her to them yet more.
Certainly she could have evaded this if it had been merely a matter of persuading her husband that it was time for them to go north-but the vote of their son on such a derangement of their plans settled the matter for her.
Strangely enough, the proud, patrician beauty found something presently of a savory tang in the soft taunts and jibes which her friends tossed at her with enjoyment as soon as they found that it was safe to do so.
"Don't let them get your goat, mother," Phillip had said. "Face it out-and I'll bet you'll be provided with plenty of comebacks as you finally find out details of what happened after we left the shore that night. They're a hot crew and they were certainly on their way when we left them!"
Yet the sensitive, proud woman-unwontedly silent in the midst of the heckling youngsters-was seldom allowed to feel the hot blood of a shame which was not devoid of a delicious, sensuous element ebbing from her curving cheeks during those first horns of reunion with her friends. Her ability to sit down-in the reasonably sedate bathing suit which she now wore-was the subject of wondering, jocular comment. She was urged to let the girls of the party examine the state of her posterior and report thereon to the men.
"Oh, here comes your boss, darling Phil!" cried Betty mischievously. "Are you certain you're not still showing too much skin to suit him, Marie dear? Better slip on your cloak, hadn't you?"
And, as Marie turned for a nervous glance about her, the laughter gurgled from a half dozen throats.
"It wasn't he, after all. My mistake," said Betty demurely.
"But darling," remarked Leila, with apparent concern. "You should know by this time that your naked feet and legs are too precious to be exposed this way to anyone except your son.
"If you wish to be able to eat your luncheon sitting down, I believe you'd better draw on some full tights. I should hate to see him plunge at you in broad daylight-and strip you to the lovely white hide-and smack you here in this unknown throng until you fairly howled!"
"I shouldn't-I should love it!" observed George. "And I do like to see a conversion from frivolity to morality. For instance, apart from Marie, there's the sweet Laura. Observe how castigation agrees with her, "Is she any longer the flaming youth which she was? She is not. She sits there, quiet and demure, her fingers tucked into a hand whose weight she has felt...."
"You leave me alone!" cried Laura, turning scarlet, while Paul Grayson smiled and coiled his long fingers about her wrist as well as hand. "None of you has seen me whipped. I, I haven't been whipped, at least-"
She was crimson now, shuddering with a sort of voluptuous shame.
"And anyhow," she went on, "if I went crazy there on the shore-what about the rest of you! I vow, if you pester me, I shall get out a bulletin of all that occurred-and I'll hand it to darling Marie-and then try to tease her, if you dare!"
"It was all Marie's fault anyway," observed Thalia.
"For if there was a sane person in the crowd when we saw her captured-and driven off over the sand, stark naked, like a white slave, after being beaten, then I don't know who it was!"
"You see, dearest," whispered Leila, crowding close to the flaming Marie and obviously hoping to beguile a confession from her. "It was all so beautiful-and so abnormal-with that fine boy treating you as he did!
"And you were both so overwrought and so-so thrilled-that, well, I wouldn't have blamed him in the least if, after he had beaten you some more while you were alone together, he had forgotten entirely that you are his mother.
"How marvelous to lie with such a delicious boy as Phil is-and to scoff at even the most elementary conventions-and to glean from submission such ecstasy as is almost unknown to earth!"
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
From the white throat of the tormented woman issued a hoarse little cry.
"Don't you dare think that. Don't you dare!" she said, and she buried her flushed face in her hands, shivering.
"But darling," persisted Leila, her mind aflame with a perverse curiosity as well as with a somber pleasure in her evil inquisition. "Don't you see that nobody, none of us, would blame you in the least?"
"It would be just the most exquisitely perverse and delicious experience in the world! Think of it-to be able to keep for your very own in every way such a wonderful son!
"And we all know already-we have seen-that he does as he likes with you in other ways-that he spares you no shame or pain when he is incensed at you.
"If he were my son-and these others can hear if they like-I should most certainly guide him toward every abandonment of the flesh, if only to placate him and keep him from thrashing me too often.
"And how marvelous he is-when he is excited and naked-and when he grinds that white dagger of his j against your flesh while he hugs you!"
"Oh God!" gasped the beleaguered Marie. "You were watching then-that first day when we were in the bath house! Phil told me you were, but I thought he must be mistaken. Damn each and every one of you!
"Well-you can listen to this-if I choose to recognize, when it's called to my attention by somebody who loves me, that I have been acting like a harum scarum, disgraceful girl of half my years-and to undergo penalties which serve to fix my faults in my mind and help me to eradicate them-then that's my business and that of only one other-who is old, in some ways, beyond his years. And aside from that it's all as innocent as anything that happened in the Garden of Eden!"
"H-m, the records of what occurred in the Garden of Eden are a trifle imperfect," murmured Jack Breedon, in high and morbid delight, like all the others.
"I wouldn't swear that there wasn't a good deal of monkey business going on there. And later on, too-we can only surmise what happened when Cain and his dear naked mother went walking together-while Adam was drowsing...."
"All right, smear the sacred relationship of mother and son with the effluvia of your wicked minds!" cried Marie, now so overwrought, despite her determination to remain cool, that she quite believed for the moment that she was being unjustly accused of a horrid crime.
She rolled upon her face, intending to remain obstinately inattentive to whatever else might be said. Unhappily, the rather loose legs of even this comparatively decorous bathing costume were also very short.
The lower curves of superb buttocks peered forth. They shone pinkly in the sunlight, in contrast to the snowy delicacy of her thighs. And George Dunham was instantly moved to lift lightly, almost to the middle of the nearest buttock, the partially veiling fabric-and he showed to the gleaming eyes of all the party a mound so reddened and so sensitive that-as he patted it gently, Marie sighed and then panted with fury and shame at this public disclosure of her state.
She strove to turn again upon her back-but the man, assisted by Leila upon her other side, held her firmly. Leila, too, exposed a red and bruised naked hillock and, as George bent to kiss libidinously the nearest mound, Leila laid her own lips to the scarlet flesh in pleased emulation of his action.
"Oh, what a whacking. I don't see how you can ever even speak to him again!" cried Betty, as the distracted, furiously flushed Marie was permitted to roll over at length and to hide the evidence of her fate.
"I-I deserved it. I realized that all of a sudden," said the confused woman haltingly. "I, I allowed him to do it-for there was nobody else to give me the lesson which was needed to fix it in my mind that I had been going too far."
"Very accommodating of him, I'm sure," observed Leila. "He was deserving of his fee-whatever that was! But of course you really needn't have troubled him-if your conscience was complaining and if you felt that thrashings were your only remedy-for there is at least one genuine expert in our own crowd."
She looked meaningly and smilingly at Paul Grayson, who smiled grimly back at her. But Laura frowned, her placid, sweet face puckered-and she snuggled closer to her tyrant and held both his hands, as if in fear that he might be moved to use one of them on some other body than her own.
Paul petted-gently smacked-a large, firm, almost naked breast of his willing serf-and Laura, upon her back by his side, smiled languorously up into his eyes.
She shrieked suddenly as George, seeing a dark lock projecting suggestively from her loose legged costume, pulled hard upon the tendril of genital hair.
"I'll tell everything unless you stop hurting me!" she cried threateningly. "Make him stop, Paul!"
But, as her lover merely smiled as the ever licentious Thalia thrust a hand into the broad leg of the suit and, delving into the soft sexualities so that Laura squirmed and panted, drew forth into the light more of the plentiful genital adornment-as he even held her hands and prevented revolt while both George and Leila toyed with her thus indecently-Laura burst forth:
"Listen, Marie, don't you be the least bit ashamed in presence of these wretches-for they did-oh, the most incredibly awful things the other evening-after you had gone away!"
"And you, I suppose you were as cool as a cucumber!" jeered Betty.
"No, I'm confessing, even I was swept away by the contagion," sighed Laura. "Oh-how can you let them touch me that way, Paul, and hold me tightly while they do it!
"They tug and pull-ouch-and then they slip their fingers right between my legs-oh, darling-don't let them-it makes me feel so very, very-funny!
"And then you'll smack me again for being lewd in public!"
"Ah yes, this is the lady who has never been chastised, but has only consented to kiss her boyfriend, somewhat daringly, before us all!" commented Leila.
"Well-you might as well know, Marie-and then maybe you won't be so horribly shy about telling me what I'm burning to know-and Laura will tell you anyhow , when she gets a chance. George and I committed the work of the flesh after you had gone, but only after we were fairly pestered into it by the scandalous, indescribable things which the rest of them were doing!"
"Being whipped and carried off all naked was nothing to the rest of it!" persisted Laura, sighing with a sort of regretful relief as the fingers of Thalia and George were withdrawn at last from her privacies. "They all, all spent-every one of them-except poor me! And in such ways!"
"You didn't spend-oh, no-when you made some one else give up his last drop-and took it as if it were nectar!" cried Betty. "My God, I dream of what you did to Paul-and your lovely thighs were all gleaming with moisture at the tops when I touched them afterwards!"
"There!" exclaimed the persistent Leila; as Laura covered her rosy face with outspread fingers and trembled in silent confession. "After all these explicit admissions and revelations, the least you can do, Marie, is to let us know just what went on between you and Phil after he took you away from the bathing party.
"And afterwards I'll tell you more-every least thing-how Thalia screwed Betty-and what her brazen fiance here did to her at the same time. Tell us, darling, did he? Oh, he's such a lusty, lustful, lovely boy-and certainly, in the state you were in, he could have done anything he liked, couldn't he?"
"He did nothing whatever!" fibbed the quivering Marie. "You are being simply disgusting, Leila! There are certain boundaries beyond which one cannot trespass-even in thought or words.
"I will admit," she went on in crestfallen humility, hoping to turn the thoughts of the morbidly interested crew from the sin which burned lusciously in her fair bosom's depths by an admission which shamed her tremendously, even while she vibrated sensually over this sacrifice of her womanly pride.
"I must admit-since you are all so very frank, that Phil made me go with him to that secluded bathhouse where you all had the crust to spy upon us before.
"And he didn't let me put on my clothes again until he had spanked me until I wept and wailed and had to cram my fist to my mouth to keep from being heard at the hotel. You've seen the state in which he left my backside! And oh how sore it still is!"
"Let me rub it gently, sweet lady," proposed John Breedon, toppling her from her side to her face, denuding her rosy buttocks entirely and using both hands in luscious caresses upon the tender mounds.
"No, don't-please!" stammered Marie, raising her head and looking about with obvious trepidation.
"Doesn't it feel good, doesn't it relieve the soreness?" queried Jack.
"Yes, it's lovely," sighed Marie. "But...."
"Can't you see that she's scared to death for fear her son may see her being touched that way?" demanded Thalia. "She'll be in for another beating if he catches her-and she knows it very well! Better stop, Jack."
"It must be simply terrible," proffered Betty, "to be so afraid of any male! Think of having to guard everything you do for fear of being taken and stripped disgracefully and slapped until you cry!"
"It's terrible, yes," breathed Laura. "That is, I mean, it must be awful-but there might be compensations...."
"And well you know it!" smiled George.
"But, good heavens, not to be able to call your very soul your own!" cried Betty. "I should be so ashamed that I'd stay in bed rather than face people.
"Now here is Marie-the imperious, self-willed Marie-so effaced now that she cringes at a shadow! All the good times we've had together are over for her. She's got to hang on the caprices of a kid boy-and she's got to be as decorous as a deaconess ... "
"I have not!" denied Marie indignantly, the exquisite pink of her cheeks deepening. "I've had a sort of self-imposed chastisement or two-because I felt that I had gone too far in a sort of loose life and that I deserved it.
"And I let my son apply them-as one might let a confessor or a minister attend to one's discipline, and it was much seemlier to have a near relative do these things than any alien.
"But I'm not in the least afraid of my boy-and you may be certain that he couldn't and wouldn't do anything which I didn't allow. And I don't intend by any means to change my way of living or to abandon our happy frolics-but simply to set a decent limit to my own abandons-whatever the rest of you may do."
"Dare you to strip down your bathing waist-and give us all just an instant's view of your glorious breasts-as you used to do while we gathered closely about to shield you from all other interloping eyes!" said George.
"No, oh, no!" cried Marie nervously, clasping her arms over her lovely bosom and glancing hurriedly about again. "I've been ashamed of having done that so many times-and I would never have done it even once if you hadn't all flattered me so much and sworn it was just in the same mood that an artist might have in wishing to see his model. I know my bosom is nice, what's the sense in denying it? But nobody has the actual right to see it except...."
She paused, flushing anew.
"Except?" prompted Leila.
"My husband," murmured Marie.
"And your darling son," laughed Leila, while the beleaguered Marie blushed painfully.
"Tell him from me-Phil, I mean, and not Judge Brower-that he's got a heavenly cinch which Paris might have envied," remarked George. "But there are other lovely busts in this crowd, too.
"Laura's splendid big breasts are half uncovered already. Let us all see the darling, white twins, Laura. Strip down to the navel for just one quick display, won't you? It will be an inspiration for us all; girls as well as men."
"I will not. I certainly will not, and how dare you, George Dunham!" flared the buxom, auburn-headed young wife. And then, as Paul Grayson caught her in wiry hands, she leaped from indignation into pleading.
"Paul-oh, how can you, Paul-as if I were a pony or some other animal which you owned!" she cried.
For, while the other members of the party gathered closely about to shield her from the view of strolling bathers, the man had deftly stripped her one-piece garment downward to below her navel-revealing her full, shapely, creamy-skinned nudity so far that half the patch of auburn curls above her crotch was in view.
As she still twisted and protested-glancing about in tense apprehension of being seen by others and thus being the unwilling center of a scandal-Paul slapped her snowy, soft flanks sharply-whereupon, with a little whimper, Laura subsided submissively.
"You're lovely, Laura, with that splendid, firm bust and tiny, stiff nipples and trim waist line," said Thalia simply.
"For God's sake, hurry and look, since you must!" urged Laura. "People are walking in this direction-and some of the persons sitting near are beginning to turn their heads in this direction too. Oh Paul-how can you do this to me-and risk my reputation-and I thought you were fond of me!"
"Proud as well as fond," observed the man, baring yet more of the fine body-so that Laura had to press her legs together to hide the ruddy line of her sex.
"That's why I'm showing you off so liberally. How does it seem-to be the same as naked in broad daylight-with a thousand persons within a city block or so of you?"
"Strip her stark naked!" urged George lewdly. "That will be something to boast of-though we'd never be able to get people in the north to believe it-that we've all sat about a chaste and highly placed young matron of Manhattan-on the crowded beach and in broad daylight-when she was utterly bare!"
"God almighty!" gasped Laura. "Hurry, then-oh, hurry-since you're bound to do it! There, now, for God's sake throw that mantle over me!"
As her lover stripped the single garment completely off over her toes, Marie cast anxious glances about, after one quick look at the nude Laura.
"Oh, I'm afraid we're discovered! Several persons are staring-and some men are coming quite close," she whispered. "We should have known-you wicked men should have known-that we couldn't hide an entirely naked body from folks anywhere from twenty to a hundred feet away!
"There'll be a fearful scandal-it will get to New York and everywhere. You know what these reporters are and they'll more than hint at the facts in their dispatches."
"Hide Laura's face as well as her body," directed Leila, the coolest of the party in face of this very real danger, for there was almost a gaping ring of grinning persons about the group by this time.
"And we must all scurry off as fast as possible. They'll recognize the rest of us, but they'll not be able to swear to Laura's identity, even though they may suspect it-and the libel laws are in force."
Poor Laura-whose chief anguished fear was lest this episode should reach the ears of her dignified husband in Manhattan-was hustled off, muffled to the hair, in the midst of the fleeing group.
Scattering as they neared the hotel, they made their ways deviously to the luxurious suite of the perturbed Mrs. Senter.
The other members of the party were breathing a bit more easily now-some of them even able to smile over what had happened. But Laura, her wrappings dropping to the floor, fell there herself as the men who were supporting her let go of her arms-and she promptly went into hysterics.
Writhing, laughing, weeping, she twisted upon the carpet in the midst of the group. With sharp cries she dashed from the hands of the men who brought in glasses of water or brandy. The attempted consolations of the women went apparently unheard.
Suddenly Paul Grayson, setting his jaws grimly, picked up the naked, hysterical woman and carried her swiftly into her bedroom. He closed the door behind him-but it was promptly and silently opened by Leila.
"I think he's going to apply his own curative methods," she whispered to the others. "They're likely to be severe ones too, for Laura's half crazy."
Her inferences proved to be correct. For Paul had already twisted the dangling, vociferating woman beneath his left arm and was bringing down sound smacks upon her devoted bottom. As she continued to sob and shriek and laugh in alternation, he seated himself in a low chair-and resumed the castigation with methodical regularity.
Now Laura moaned and spoke pleading words huskily at times-obviously coming out of her fit very slowly. She was writhing now upon his lap-in a twisting juxtaposition so exciting to the man that, paying no attention to the peeking spectators even if he saw them, he paused and swiftly doffed his bathing suit, while he held the drooping, helpless Laura by one arm like a captive.
Resuming his seat, he drew her again face downward across his lap. The smacking blows of his hand upon her plump bottom rang out once more-again she twisted and wailed and gave vent to hysterical cries-and this time she was giving Paul, with every movement of her full, naked belly upon his standing organ, sensations which obviously delighted him to the utmost.
"Oh-oh God, Paul, you're hurting me terribly!" cried Laura now, evidently regaining consciousness of what was going on. "Don't, darling, please-oh, please-I, I'll be good-and do whatever you say-God, oh God-my bottom is on fire! Please dearest darling, I'll suck you so nicely-if you'll only stop!"
But the particular, ignominious favor which she offered so naively was not to be required from her on this occasion. Not yet had Grayson taken full possession of her fine person-and, wild with lust now, he designed to make her forget that she even had a husband.
Suddenly, fully conscious now and weeping softly, Laura found herself posted on hands and knees on her own bed. Obediently keeping the posture in which he had placed her, she offered her scarlet, inflamed buttocks, rosy moons above the whiteness of her full thighs hardly browned by exposure to the sun, to the eyes of Paul and of the others.
She sighed in delight as the man encircled her body with his arms and rubbed his swollen engine upon her burning flesh. She trembled and gasped as his fingers found and parted the borders of her rosy cleft-and a low, guttural sob of sheer joy greeted the invasion of her sex by his shaft.
To the drumming ears of the happy Paul came soft exclamations which apprised him of the audience at the now fully opened door of the chamber. But nothing could stop him now. He turned his head to show white teeth in an almost ghastly grin-and proceeded to make an enraptured maniac of his beaten mistress by so fervent a copulation as whipped the nerves of the plump, pretty, twenty-year-old wife into a lather of delirious bliss.
"Baby, what a show was there, my countrymen!" said George, as, after watching the glorious consummation, he led the way from the suite-for it seemed to be agreed that Laura's swooning happiness should not be marred by letting her become aware that her pseudo violation had been accomplished in the presence of observers.
That gossip about what had occurred on the beach should creep about was inevitable. There had been keen-eyed observers who had been practically certain of the identity of the woman who had had the "brazen audacity" to let herself be stripped to the skin on the beach in daylight-and the names of those who had participated in the "outrage" were freely bandied about too.
Happily, although a five days' wonder at the resort, the affair never reached the ears of Laura's husband or their families-and, entirely given over to her lover and their friends, the fair victim hardly saw the peering, scandalized glances of elderly critics or the smiles of younger strangers as she passed.
Thus her suffering over the matter was far exceeded by the happiness it had brought her. But there were others not so fortunate. Betty had a sharp letter from an elder brother-who had seen a letter written to a friend of his from Palm Beach and quoting names.
And Marie was to have a devastating experience in direct consequence of the imbroglio.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It was rather late at night-a couple of days after the episodes just narrated-that, seated before the mirror in her own chamber and garbed in nightgown and slippers and kimono, Marie was brushing out her long, gleaming dark golden hair.
Suddenly Phillip stood before her, an irate Phillip, as she could see at a glance. He was in pajamas. Her smile died away on her lips as she saw his tense features.
"I've just heard of your beach party of Thursday," he said at last. "A splendid revel-a naked woman-in broad daylight on the beach-and Mrs. Judge Brower a ring leader! God in heaven, mother, are you crazy!"
"I a ring leader-no!" stammered Marie. "Good heavens, no, they will all tell you if you ask them!"
The boy looked at her steadily. In growing perturbation she went on:
"I tried to stop them. I protested. I went away presently-when I saw that nothing could bring them to their .senses--I actually fled!"
"Yes, I heard that you fled-in the very midst of them-and after people had gathered around to enjoy the sight of one of your closest female friends quite naked," observed Phil.
His boyish face was white with rage.
"Fibbing too!" he burst out. "Disgracing your family and then lying about it! You know what you're going to catch for all this! Come over here to me-and lift up your nightdress-up to your shoulders. I'll make you remember this lapse-after I had your faithful promise never to indulge in any indecency with that mob again!"
His mother shrank and trembled, paling as the boy produced and snapped in the air a short whalebone whip. And then suddenly she was flaming with anger.
"You dare, you simply dare, so much as touch me in violence-and I shall report you instantly to your father!" she cried. "And he shall learn everything-everything, mind you-including the fact that a cruel and unnatural son has made me an unnatural mother-when I was beside myself and irresponsible for what I did-and a faithless wife as well!"
"Not a bad idea-he should learn what you have been up to," agreed Phil, reining himself in for softer speech as his beautiful mother grew violent. "After all, it is to him, I suppose, that you are primarily responsible.
"You may be glad to know that he has heard plenty of rumors about your actions here at Palm Beach, including this latest scandal, and that he has suffered in what I consider a weak and almost cowardly silence-just because of some fanciful feeling that a physical inability to indulge you in some ways is an injury to you of which he ought to be ashamed-and because, too, he has always humored you like a child.
"I think he should be glad to find that somebody can take you in hand, for the sake of the entire family, even if he cannot. We'll go to him right now."
And the surprised, wretchedly apprehensive Marie, pale with wrath and dismay over this unexpected repercussion of the bomb she had cast, found herself hustled from her own room to that of the Judge. After one vigorous rap, Phil opened and entered, fairly dragging his lovely mother with him.
Knowing his sire's weakness where his charming wife was concerned, the boy wasted no time in permitting discussion. Under the widely opened, amazed, dark eyes of his father-who was perched up on pillows reading in his bed-he yanked the silk kimono from his mother's shoulders.
He tore the folds of the long nighty upward-and he took the almost fainting woman-naked, flaccid, helpless, her head swimming and the rich blood again flooding her face-beneath his arm.
"This is what she has been needing, father, just you watch!" he cried. "I'll show you how bad girls, whether they are four or thirty-four, ought to be corrected and kept within bounds!"
"But, God in heaven, Phil!" stuttered the bewildered Judge, when at last he could speak. "You cannot do a thing like this. This is your own dear mother-whom you hold in so disgraceful a posture-and entirely exposed! Think what you're doing!"
"I have been thinking-the only one in the family, I believe, to do any effective thinking of late," responded the boy, as he coolly shifted the trembling, nude body of Marie so that he held her tightly about the slender waist and that her magnificent posterior-its satin whiteness still tinged faintly with pink here and there from his last devastating spanking-was amply presented not only to his father's eyes, but to his own blows.
"And if she weren't my own dear mother and your own dear wife I wouldn't think of bothering to try to reform her. Don't attempt to interfere, father, please. You'll be glad later on if you don't..
"Daddy-oh, daddy," moaned the appalled, frightened and deathly ashamed Marie, using for the first time in years the affectionate title she had been won't to give him after the birth of this boy, their first born. "Help-help-oh, don't let him-oh, o-oh!"
Her final wails arose amid the smacking sound of lusty blows upon her quivering bottom.
"Didn't you tell me you knew you deserved this punishment? Didn't you?" demanded the youth, pausing after half a dozen smart smacks on the tender mounds.
"Didn't you admit you were ashamed of the madness which had led you to wear the most scant and scandalous of bathing suits amid your companions-when, indeed, you wore anything at all? And didn't you say you hoped I would whip you soundly if you ever transgressed decency again upon the beach? Didn't you?"
Phil's right hand was raised high in the air, hovering ominously over the doomed behind of his distracted mother. With head turned over her round shoulder, the woman watched it-her lovely face as red now as fire and her gray eyes starting from her head.
As the hand moved as if to descend, she almost shrieked her assent to his words-although hardly knowing now whether she most dreaded or longed for his blows and the fearful fever which already they were arousing in her secret flesh.
"Yes, I did, Phil. I did, daddy. I did say that, but, Phil, how can you wish to beat your mother-and in the presence of your father?"
"I don't wish to do it," fibbed the boy, cognizant now that, as always when he held his mother thus, his young member was straining at the leash.
"It seems necessary-that is all. Tell father the truth. Tell him of your latest escapade-and admit that this seems the only way to correct you."
As the shrinking woman sobbed softly and began again to struggle, Phillip gave each full buttock a pair of resound mg blows. A low cry broke from Marie's parted lips in salutation of each whack. In desperation she sobbed out her confession.
"Yes-yes, daddy, I was in a party that undressed a woman-Laura Senter-on the beach. Oh, I'm so sorry-and I'll never, never!"
Almost palsied with continuous amazement, hardly aware of the other sentiment which began to grow in the very depths of his being, Judge Brower had slipped from the bed and, his own eyes bulging, approached the group.
If he had meant to interfere, and that had been his vague thought, his delay was fatal from the standpoint of the dangling, helpless Marie. For her son just then administered several more sharp blows upon her bottom.
The woman cried out dully-the anguish of her intense shame and the smarting heat of the smacks becoming slowly merged in the voluptuous glow which she never failed to feel when thus treated.
The amazed Judge Brower heard such sighs from her lips as he had been able to wrest from them when they were still young spouses-he saw her turn toward him dazed eyes which yet flamed oddly, nostrils which vibrated, lips which quivered.
"Tell him...." he heard Phil say, and the rest of the message was whispered in the woman's ear.
Another pair of whacks were required to bring compliance. And then Marie whimpered:
"Daddy, leave us alone. Don't try to stop Phil. This, this-oh-this spanking will do me good. I deserve it and I'm willing to endure it-oh, oh-God!"
The final softly moaned words were caused by the fact that, her head hanging not far from her husband's crotch, her glazed eyes had noted the shameful fact that her shame and misery and pain-her abnormal subjugation by their son-had had upon the Judge an effect which her mere nakedness, admirable though that sight was, had not had for a year or more.
The fore part of his pajama trousers bulged unmistakably-even traces of white and turgid flesh was visible between straining buttons.
In very truth, Judge Brower found himself moved as never before in his life. His slumbering sexuality had awakened with a bound to the perversity of this situation-a situation which, for all his intended interference, he would not have missed becoming acquainted with for many thousands of dollars.
Whether it was the calm way in which his young schoolboy of a son had taken possession of his lovely mother, stripped her shamefully and beaten her-whether it was his own perception that the lad was hugely excited-and the woman also-by this penitential conjunction-in any event the Judge found himself hugely potent for the first time in many months.
Becoming aware now himself that his father shared the tremendous sensual agitation which, as he had learned days earlier, always overcame his mother and himself when he punished her, Phillip deliberately set out on a campaign which had its element of filial devotion and un-filial constraint, its element of lustful curiosity over bodily relations which should have been sacred to him.
With self command and intention, he began to pummel his mother's naked backside in such manner as, he had discovered, inflamed her passions most fully and left her helpless to control them in the least.
Softly he smacked the fine buttocks-raising the quivering body over his knee as he placed a foot on an ottoman-while his father sank into a chair opposite the pinkening bottom and mopped a damp brow.
Over the dangling head of Marie drooped the nightdress. With a gesture the boy invited his sire to remove the garment-and now Judge Brower hastened to comply-completing his wife's denuding without the least hesitation.
Seating himself once more, he let his gleaming eyes devour the remarkable scene-the roses flowering upon the woman's bottom-her dragging masses of gleaming, beautiful hair-her shamed and scarlet face, its eyelids closed, hanging almost to the carpet-her splendid naked torso and shapely, twisting legs-the intimacies revealed to both his son and himself by the occasional contortions.
The older male was panting now, like the others, as he read clearly the crescendo of acute passion in both his wife and their child. He observed how the lad's blows, hardly hurting at all now, it was obvious, descended at times from the silken buttocks to smite quickly and lightly upon the ruddy little gash when it was revealed as the legs parted.
He heard Marie's sobs become husky and then die away to be replaced by feverish little moans. With a queer mixture of paternal and connubial shame which was quickly swallowed up in lecherous delight, he saw the naked hip of the woman rub persistently against the stiffness which distended the boy's pajamas.
Suddenly Phillip-pretexting a weariness in this position-sank upon the ottoman in a sitting posture. He swung about and, taking his mother's nether parts across his knees, he raised her head and shoulders to his father's lap.
"Hold her for a while like that, father, so that she can't break loose," he requested, and, resuming his spanking, disdaining the little whip with which he had intended to belabor her as the piece de resistance he increased gradually the force of his blows until his mother's belly was squirming upon his excited virility.
Gasping, sobbing with a somber delight in her suffering and her shame-welcoming the flame which was distilled in all her nerves now by her son's smacks-Marie kept her bare belly in constant motion against the beloved young member which had once impaled her-and ever and again she threw her legs apart, silently asking for more of those slaps upon her throbbing sex.
But the boy refrained-watching how his father was surreptitiously caressing the woman, kissing her tear-moist face, feeling the satin shoulders and back, welcoming the pressure upon his lap of the firm naked bust.
Uneasily Marie endured these attentions, apparently half afraid that her son would resent them. But-relenting in the severity of his blows when she was complacent toward her husband and hitting harder when she squirmed and tried to prevent the Judge from acting as he pleased-the boy soon taught her what his present wish was.
And Marie, shame vanishing in an overwhelming libidinousness as she realized that her son wanted his father encouraged rather than repulsed, raised a flaming face to return the Judge's kisses.
Her plaint fingers worked upon his newly resuscitated virility, she even bared it beneath the shelter of her body and rubbed its swollen length upon her breasts.
The boy had his reward-in the shape of the perverse enjoyment which he had suddenly found himself craving. For his sire, half maddened now with desire, oblivious of the unspeakable indecency of giving their child this spectacle-caught up his nude wife as Phil ceased his castigation and carried her to the bed.
"Oh-oh, my God!" panted Marie, as she realized what was at hand. "Shall I, must I, Phil darling?"
And this strange appeal to their son-which merely seemed to inflame the Judge the more-was smothered upon her lips as her husband, kissing her passionately, rolled her upon the bed.
Her little squeaks of pain as her sore and sensitive bottom was pressed upon the sheet passed unnoticed now. All shame gone in the whirlwind of his passion, her spouse jerked off his night garb, holding Marie down with a hand as if she were a half wild animal which might escape him-which, indeed, she was-for she tried to slip from the couch even now just as her husband pinned her beneath the weight of his body.
Even now she resisted somewhat-and it was not until Phil stole to the bedside and grasped one of her hands that she became completely acquiescent.
Glorying in the rejuvenation which the remarkable sight of his wife's castigation by their son had wrought in him, Judge Brower went on to spit her throbbing and lovely body upon his sexual shaft with a lecherous turbulence which he had not manifested for years.
Queerly, he felt no repugnance now to owing this precious gift to the boy who stood by the bedside with his mother clinging to his hand, nor did he even mind revealing to Phillip this replica of the torrid embrace in which the youth himself had been engendered some seventeen years earlier.
It was over now. Phil had stolen silently from the room, as his mother, her legs locked about his father's loins, fell back in the throes of their simultaneous emission. It had been marvelous to watch, the boy thought-and he had been unaware of the least pang of genuine jealousy-although he would have gone mad with resentment and chagrin if he had even had reason to suspect his mother's similar surrender outside of their own household.
Yet-unappeased, his young member stiff and throbbing-he was naked upon his own bed a half hour later-not able to sleep, harassed with visions and longings.
He had heard no sound, but suddenly a white wraith stood beside his bedside.
"I just had to come, darling," whispered his mother. "I was so afraid you might be suffering, perhaps angry. I was not at all certain that you would not whip me again for coming. Oh, my own precious, indescribable tyrant, what a state you're in!"
And, sitting, allowing herself to be drawn into his arms for warm kisses, she softly caressed his great dagger. Naked as the dawn, she was shuddering voluptuously in his embrace.
"Did you enjoy it, dearest, seeing your father take me that way?" she whispered tenderly, with her lips moving against those of her son. "Wasn't it fearful-for a son to see? And darling-imagine the miracle of his being able to do that-just because he saw you use me so odiously!"
"Odiously!" whispered Phillip, patting her burning behind and simulating an intention to smack it harder.
"Don't you dare, beloved son!" cried his mother, twisting in his arms. "I shan't sit in comfort for days as it is! Not odiously, darling-gloriously, deservedly! But what an idea, what a perfectly mad idea, to make your father a spectator to my shame and disgrace!
"Yet it was clear what effect it had on you both, and I suppose I must make up my mind to suffer not only when I have displeased either of my men but whenever you are feeling-naughty. Though-listen, Phil-if your father ever so much as lifts a finger to me himself-that will be the end! I'll not endure it from him!"
"Looks as if I were the duly appointed family executioner in that case," said the lad. "Oh, mother how unspeakably lovely you are all naked!"
"Repulsive when I'm dressed, I suppose," smiled Marie.
She was rolling upon his nude body now.
"I-I'm all clean-washed everywhere-fresh and scented and powdered," she whispered, nibbling his face, his neck, his bosom. "I-your father-it was wonderful, but-oh, Phil, don't make me say it-it wasn't like you-it didn't satisfy me in the glorious way that you do!"
And she hid her face upon his naked belly, softly rubbing his rigid scepter the while.
As, mischievously, he failed to respond actively to her words and provocations, she began, sighing with the lust for her son which had drawn her from her bed, to kiss and to lick his flat belly, his muscular young thighs.
And, quite suddenly, swept by a luscious longing which she could not resist, she found herself licking the flanks of the turgid column which her fingers held.
Shaking with this new delight, the boy lay prone, staring into the semi-darkness. And now he knew a bliss even more keen-for there were hot kisses and lickings upon the ultra sensitive head of his member-and then warm, licentious lips encircled it and a moist mouth enwrapped the knob.
"This is what Laura did to Paul Grayson before the whole bunch. I heard all about it," she whispered, raising a shamed but radiant face at length.
"Perhaps it's what a poor woman must do to a tyrant who beats her-in order to make him merciful. Oh, darling, how lovely your sweet pecker is!"
And once again her draining, sucking lips clung about the tip of the standing shaft.
Even though longing for the consummation for which his inflamed mother also longed-even though determined that this new delight should be his frequently and to the climax in the future-Phil yet had pity for the marvelous body which was vibrating and thrashing about even while Marie sucked him.
He knew that for the quelling of her present glorious lunacy there was but one means-and, rolling her upon her back, he possessed her in a frenzy of mutual rapture.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Of the fact that her young son now entirely dominated her, Marie no longer attempted concealment when with the circle of her closest friends. She did not even deny, when pressed, that it was only by his tolerance that she was longer able to rejoin them occasionally.
"Certainly I wouldn't dare come unless he explicitly permitted it," she admitted, with rosy embarrassment, in response to a jocular remark of George Dunham. "You have all seen what happens to me when he is angry-and if anyone blames me for humoring him-for you all know, too, that he's a darling when he isn't angry...."
"But not just how great a 'darling' he can be," remarked Leila, with a keen glance at Marie; which was ignored by the flushed woman.
"And, anyhow," added the reformed character, "he was right all the time and I was wrong. And I don't think anyone here is in a position to taunt me for letting him have his way."
"Depends a good deal on just what 'his way' is," said Betty coaxingly, and she licked rosy lips with the tip of a red tongue. 'Tell us, dearest, do!"
And, as Marie ignored this comment and demand also, the girl burst forth:
"I'd give lots to see him give you a real spankings-and what comes after it-when he thought nobody was looking! I'll bet it's like Laura with her Paul, the long-legged tyrant, and that's what lies back of your sudden and complete giving in to the boy!"
She made a face at Paul Grayson, who merely smiled in return, and the snuggled face of Laura was not even raised from his lap to expostulate or retort. Marie, likewise, said nothing-giving simply a would-be indignant glance at the licentious tormentor.
Truth to tell, it was no longer sheer anguished shame which she felt when thus plagued about the obvious surrender of her will to that of Phillip. Or, if it was shame, she was aware of a pleasant quivering of her nerves, of a morbid delight in having her disgrace thus made quasi public among persons of whose reticence she thought she could be certain because of the hold she had upon them.
She was almost inclined to glory-in spite of occasional spasms of incredulous shame over what had happened-in the perverse and abnormal amour which had followed so closely upon the heels of her son's first authoritative clutch upon her body.
Certainly this amour-and even the ignominious floggings which accompanied it-formed her chief joy in life nowadays. She hugged to her breast in secret each tiniest recollection, each minute detail or her entire surrender and subjugation-and, for a little or a nothing, she might well have breathed into the ear of a close friend, when nervous delight was full upon her, the appalling facts.
Yet how entire that surrender and subjugation were would hardly have been credited by anyone-except her husband, who was now, almost continuously, a thrilled and not unwilling spectator.
For even in the midst of the family circle, except when Phil's younger sisters were about, the youth found a morbid delight in controlling her acts-and she in having them controlled.
Under guise of punishment for some infinitesimal wrong doing, she was sometimes sent to bed dinnerless-or packed into a comer or a closet to stand until released.
Dorcas and Dora-the blonde, fourteen-year-old twins-had entered once or twice in such a scene, and had stared in amazement as it was hurriedly explained to them that it was "only a game."
Fascinated oddly to the depths of a sensual nature by the abnormal situation existing in the household of which he was the theoretical head, Judge Brower began to profit by it unashamedly.
Upon his suggestion to Phillip, the wife who had recently been so chary with him in every way would be compelled to sit, naked to the waist or entirely denuded, between husband and son in the evening and read to them in her sweet, low voice.
Or she would be bidden, and would comply with never failing blushes of shame, to lift her clothing and, going from one male to the other, expose her nude buttocks, usually rosy from spanking or lashing, and allow them to be petted and caressed.
She grew to be as obedient as any child to Phillip in this pseudo privacy-far more so than most children. For, if her husband manifested an inclination for the most extreme privileges with her person-which he did rather frequently nowadays-the boy would force her to accompany the Judge to bed-and, as a stimulant which invariably caused the older man to be as potent as a youth, she would be soundly whipped by her son before mounting to her husband's side.
If the Judge suspected that his beautiful wife was also the wildly happy mistress of their son-and it is hardly to be denied that he must have done so in view of many an incident-he was determinedly silent and blind and obtuse upon the matter. In all likelihood, he found such a situation vastly exciting to his own senses.
Presently he was faced by an undeniable fact-a fact which could not be ignored since, without intention, he had entered the sitting room full upon it one afternoon.
Crouched upon the floor at Phil's knees was Marie, rubbing her superb and naked bust upon the nude thighs of the lad whose trousers she had drawn to his knees. Engulfed in her sweet mouth was a goodly portion of the boy's standing rod, and she was sucking it with rosy cheeked abandon and gusto.
"Having a lovely time, dear ones?" queried the Judge softly, as soon as he could speak at all. "But go easy on our son, sweetheart, won't you? There's no greater bliss, undoubtedly, than you are causing him, but too frequent indulgence might harm him."
"We know, father," said the boy calmly, while his shamed mother cowered, with crimson face hovering above his lap. "It is only seldom that I allow . .
"All right, splendid!" said his father hurriedly, and, after shuffling some papers upon a desk, he left the room.
But apparently the shock of what he had seen exercised a tremendous effect upon him. Through the half-opened door into his chamber, Phil could hear him sighing stertorously. Peering, he saw his father, half undressed and wrapping a cold, wet cloth about his swollen virility in the effort to subdue it.
Instantly, for he had not intended in any event to taste his mother's luscious caress to the full this time, he drew the feebly resisting woman into the room of his father. He stripped her quickly to the skin-and, seeing that this time the Judge required no spanking of his wife as a stimulant, he thrust her into his father's arms.
Bitterly ashamed over being thus handed over to sub due an agitation caused by her perverse and ardent caress of the boy whom she so deeply loved, the woman gave brief battle-protesting, twisting as her husband, denuded now, slipped to her side upon the bed.
But she yielded utterly and instantly as the boy approached, flourishing his whalebone whip-and, once more insisting on holding her son's hand, she gave herself in a bliss which more nearly approached that which she was won't to taste with Phil than she could have anticipated.
For Judge Brower, maddened with lust over what he had seen, was a satyr upon her body that day. He sucked her breasts, licked her panting belly, and, for the first time, he was moved to part her white legs and plunge his reddened face between them for a devouring caress of her rosy cleft with lips and tongue.
Hugely interested, Phillip looked on-his own weapon stiff in the trousers which he had drawn up and rebuttoned. The fingers of his mother clung hard to his own. She was gasping, shivering with delight.
Judge Brower had meant no more than to kiss tenderly the delicate femininity-yet he found himself aflame with lecherous fervor suddenly, holding the lovely thighs well apart, licking the slit hotly, boring inward with his tongue, overjoyed to hear Marie moan with rapture and feel her clutch at his still abundant hair with the hand which their son was not grasping while he looked on eagerly. Strangely enough, the perverse man found an uncanny joy in obtruding with his tongue into a region where, as he more than suspected, the member of his son had preceded him.
Never had he sought to caress Marie, or any other woman, in this way. Himself amazed to find how his nerves were shaken by what he was doing, he recalled, as a possible source of his inclination, the fact that, as a boy of ten, he had allowed himself to be persuaded by a sister two years older to kiss and to lick the unfledged little ruddy nook between her plump legs.
He had done this several times-with a childish shame but yet a peculiar pleasure-feeling himself lowered to the level of the great family bulldog which his sister and some of her girlish mates had allowed to lick them thus but which had been banished when Dorothy discovered that her brother's tongue could "go right inside" whereas that of the animal could not.
Dorothy had brought her young friends to taste of this new delight-and her brother, weeping in shame at first but soon succumbing, had licked as many as five naked little gashes in a single hour.
The bulldog, Hector, had been called into play that day-and had performed very eagerly-but the boy had been tremendously shaken to be called upon to minister to these juvenile passions in company with the family pet.
Yet he had worked very hard with his intruding tongue-and had been rewarded by having his services very highly rated and by hearing the girls squabble hotly as to whose turn it was to open her legs to the boy's face.
There had come a day when the indiscreet Dorothy, with whom a girl of seventeen who gave her music lessons was in the habit of taking the most indelicate liberties-had explained stammeringly to this older maiden that it was her young brother's tongue which was responsible for the sensitive state in which her teacher, examining her, found her little cleft.
And thereupon nothing would do this Angela, the music teacher, except to be herself thus caressed. Fearing to say no, in view of what she had confessed, Dorothy had arranged to bring the two together.
And so, for the first time, the lad had found himself bound in sensual shackles by a mature girl. And Angela had wished to do as well as feel. She had stripped the boy gloatingly in the retirement of a great barn-had played long with his dangling penis-and then had sent him, stark naked, under her skirt.
This was no longer a tiny and immature lass-one who, promptly and almost without shame, gave instantly a bald mound and a childish slit to his eyes and lips.
No, this was far different! He found his slender naked body in a realm of hothouse charm and enticements-in direct contact with nudities which entranced even while half frightening him. For the girl was so excited-her smooth, bare thighs shivered so against his body.
She had, unseen of him, removed her drawers. He was "to hunt, to see what could be found, not to spare kisses and caresses on the way." Groping upward, he had been amazed and scared to find soft hair growing.
Fingering curiously thereabouts, he had heard, through the skirt which encompassed him, the delighted sighs of the music teacher as his small fingers travelled. The warm thighs which clasped him he had sprinkled with kisses and soft lickings-still fingering curiously at the surprising tendrils and at the wee lips below the mound where they grew.
Suddenly Angela had twisted, moaned with pleasure-and suddenly her skirt was hoisted with a jerk-and the boy found all at his disposal now and all illuminated by the light of day.
Angela was as ignorant as the children, of actual methods in this perverse game. But she was wild with the heat of her veins-glad to expose herself thus even to Dorothy and her brother-crazy to learn the sensations of which her pupil had spoken.
It was the twelve-year-old Dorothy who took charge for her teacher appeared to be unable now to do more than writhe and sigh, clasping the naked lad to her bare belly, rubbing his small pecker frantically, trying to force his head between her legs.
His sister had acted, adjusted them-and, still rather appalled by these "lovely whiskers," the boy had kissed the ripe, dainty, virgin cleft with rising pleasure. He had licked and sucked. His young tongue had entered, driving Angela frantic with happiness.
He had been more frightened than ever when the girl had spent lavishly with hoarse moans of delight. He had tried to extricate himself. But Dorothy, wiser than he and understanding what was happening, had borne upon his head even as Angela grasped frenziedly at it to prevent his withdrawal.
Then he had succumbed entirely-and he had found himself licking up, with an odd pleasure, the liquid which had so surprisingly gushed upon his tongue.
This had been Angela's only opportunity to get at her pupil's younger brother. This indulgence had never been discovered, but he had been found by his mother, when he was the naked center of a triangle of young girls, one of them his sister.
He was being played with and fondled by six small hands-and his head drawn ever and again between bare thighs for the lewd caresses which he had learned to love to bestow.
He had been, it appeared, the innocent victim-which, indeed, he was. And, for the first and only time in his life, he had been the spectator of sound spankings administered to naked girlish posteriors.
For his mother, aggravated and shamed beyond endurance, had whacked the bottoms of not only her own small daughter but the other two damsels, without care for the interested eyes of her son.
And so all this childish folly had come to an end. But even now-as Judge Brower sucked his beautiful wife's slit, oddly unperturbed by the gazing eyes of their son-he recalled the episodes and wondered vaguely whether this inclination of his hadn't been slumbering within him all these years and whether the peculiar delight which he found in seeing his spouse beaten by Phil hadn't been born, too, upon that final day of those childish indulgences.
The tip of his tongue swept the vibrating, swollen clitoris of Marie persistently, libidinously-and suddenly she shuddered, her muscles tense, and, with a cry of rapture, she bedewed his working tongue.
Almost instantly, with his member hard as iron-proud now of its strutting dimensions-he was upon the woman. Not yet recovered from her post emission prostration, Marie would have repulsed him feebly. But she succumbed, as of won't, to the directions and the imperative hands of Phillip, who held her prone and wide-thighed for the attack.
And now, with her son's hands upon her breasts and belly compelling her acquiescence, she passed into a sensual delirium almost at once.
"You love to see us screw-your father and me-don't you, darling!" she gasped. "Show him, daddy-how he was made. Oh Phil, beloved-my blessed boy-my son!"
And, twisting beneath her husband's strokes, she reached a slender hand to the breeches of the bending youth and lustfully produced and manipulated his splendid member.
"I-I want to suck. I want to suck our boy while you take me, daddy!" she gasped.
His eyes bulging over the viciousness of the conception, the man, his weapon imbedded to the roots, ceased all motion for the instant. Already the white fingers which had been feverishly handling the rigid tool of the boy were drawing him nearer.
Thrusting pillows behind his mother's shoulders, he let himself be drawn forward until, with head turned toward him, she could lay upon his member the thirsty pink tongue which was projecting between her parted lips.
Her lovely face crimson, gurgling with satisfaction, Marie cast her legs over her spouse's loins and pressed her lips about the rosy knob of Phil's distended sex. The horror of this dual and unnatural connection served now only as a fillip to her senses-so rapidly had the fair matron advanced in depravation since her crusading son had taken her morals in his own charge.
Maddened with lecherous joy, she was careful not to interfere with the boy's pleasure even when she felt the semen gush from her husband's plunging organ and even when her own sap flowed to join it.
Trembling, vibrating, she continued to suck lusciously upon the boyish tool-and when, shivering with bliss, Phil emitted his own fluid, she controlled her own tingling nerves sufficiently to exalt his happiness by continuous softer suction and by soft fingerings of the spouting member. And she drank without repugnance every drop which came from him.
It was in this wise that, within a fortnight only, this household became committed to the cult of the unusual. There was no one and nothing to say them nay-nothing, that is, save care for the youth and innocence of the pretty, fair-haired twins and of the twelve-year-old youngest child, Nesta.
Always playing about with other well bred youngsters of their ages-retiring early to bed-the youthful maidens could hardly play the role of Cerebus.
The peril in which they lay, since the surrender of their elders to libidinous recreations, of being drawn themselves into the maelstrom became apparent-but not to the children themselves-when their beautiful mother, always eager nowadays for topics and actions which might cause a pleasant thrill for her beloved Phil, murmured to him one day of the beauty and delicate charm of the white bellies of Dorcas and Dora since a pale fleece had begun to make its appearance just above each girlish crotch-of how amazed and then ashamed they had been over this mysterious development-and of how she had had to reassure them that nothing abnormal was happening to them.
Seeing him intrigued, greatly interested-beneath an affectation of indifference-she had gone on to describe to him in some detail the wee mounds of breasts, all the loveliness of the utterly similar young bodies.
From that point, drawn further by her own licentious nature as well as by his, it had been only a step, a few days later, for Marie to manage to let Phil see both of his elder sisters quite naked in their bathroom.
It had been but a fleeting vision which she could manage for him-opening the door and entering, as if by chance, while he passed by; but Dora, seeing him glance' within, had cried out in shame-a shame which Dorcas shared when told what had occurred."
For the twins, on the verge of puberty now, had grown infinitely modest with the appearance of those wee groves of sunny tendrils upon their bodies.
BOOK II
-THE CORRUPTION OF VIOLET
CHAPTER ONE
Violet looked about her for at least the thirtieth time in the half hour since she had entered this room. She seemed still incredulous of all this luxury, as if she expected it suddenly to vanish.
The wonderful rug from Afghanistan, into which her slender feet sank when she stood; the gems from the brushes of Gainsborough, of Monet, of Henner, that hung upon the walls and gave glorious color back to the radiance of the crystal lights all about; the furnishings that combined striking beauty with comfort in a way that she had not dreamed possible; all combined to bring a glow to her heart and to her eyes and to her cheeks.
For she was a beauty loving child by birth and breeding, as well as by nature; yet this was the first occasion of her life within her recollection when she had been able to "walk in beauty, like the night" and to feel it her own setting, her own nest.
There had been, of course, those days of her infancy-not so many years back-when a home of wealth and charm had, she knew, been hers. But she could recall nothing of the time preceding her father's financial debacle and his death when she was but four years of age.
Rising from her chair she passed from the bijou of a sitting room into an equally luxurious bedchamber, where she paused to become acquainted with herself through the medium of a full length mirror set into the wall.
She saw, not indeed a perfect stranger, for the eyes of violet, the fluffy, hair of spun gold, the small mouth and delicate nose and the oval cheeks tinted with rose, were familiar; but the expensive little gown from a renowned modiste's establishment which set off the charm of face and form; the antique bracelet of wrought gold on her wrist, but which should really have been in a museum; the marvelous emerald upon her slim finger-these had all the charm of novelty to her.
She turned to reenter the sitting room-and something upon which her eyes rested at the far end of the bedchamber seemed to cause her to shrink slightly. Her face lost its look of elation. It was only a bed-and an unusually rich, expensive and comfortable looking bed at that. Surely she was not alarmed at sight of a mere bed.
Well, not exactly. Only it recalled to her mind once more that she had not as yet settled for these lovely things with which she was surrounded. A bill was to be rendered at a time that was now imminent and it was to be honorably met and the obligation blotted out.
What a misnomer to call her fine new home and gowns and jewels gifts! Why, she was to pay! She was indeed to pay, and the cost seemed to mount ever higher as the moment for squaring accounts drew near.
She felt no antipathy against her creditor-rather the reverse, for he was her kindest friend and, in a sense, her rescuer. For the option which had confronted her was either to come here to a new home, provided and equipped for her by the only person in all the world upon whom she felt that she could lean, or to drag herself back to the place she had for the better part of a year called home, there to meet a fate far more repulsive to her than that which sheer gratitude was about to impose upon her.
Fourteen years earlier Violet Bryce had lost both her parents within a month and, as if this were not enough of woe for the dictator of all things to heap upon a child of four, had been left utterly penniless. Her maternal grandmother had sheltered and cared for her, provided for her education as far as meager means would allow and had been so kind and loving always that Violet, never having really known her parents, did not miss them at all after the first few weeks of her new life had passed.
Her grandmother had now been dead nearly a year. There had been a trust fund, the income of which ceased with the passing of the old lady. Violet, in possession of merely a few hundred dollars, found it incumbent upon her to leave school, find a new home and find, too, a position which would provide her with the necessities of life.
Through the kindly agency of a former teacher of hers she had found a job as one of the numerous stenographers in the vast offices of the importing concern of Joseph Dick and Co. Providentially and farsightedly, her grandmother had insisted upon a certain business training for the girl.
Not only stenography and typewriting and bookkeeping, but even certain courses in commercial processes and principles, if commerce can be said to have principles, had been provided as pasturage for her alert mind.
Her new home was for a time in a cheap boarding house in the region east of Grand Central Station. Then, as if dropping from heaven to see that she need no longer depend on aliens for an abode, her father's younger brother, Joseph Bryce, and his wife, Violet's Aunt Anne, came from a midwestern city to dwell in New York.
It was by a double title that these two were her uncle and aunt, for her father and his brother Joe had married sisters in Hannibal, Missouri. There, had been, indeed, a double wedding when the Bryce boys had cornered a large portion of Hannibal's supply of girlish beauty by marching up the church aisle with Ada and Anne Sloane. Arthur Bryce had prospered on a grand scale, according to Hannibal standards, in Manhattan, and Joseph had just scraped along as a hardware retailer in the city of his birth.
But business calamity and death had come to the elder brother. And now the younger, having disposed of his store in Hannibal, was launching on New York's stormy seas by purchasing an interest in a wholesale hardware concern situated in the metropolis.
Of course Joseph and Anne Bryce wanted their niece with them in the small apartment which they rented and equally, of course, Violet was happy to be able to make her home with relatives. She paid in a comparatively small sum weekly, which helped in balancing the family budget; and in return she had a far more comfortable abode than any boarding house could provide, for the lady of the house, darkly blonde and still attractive at the age of thirty-three, was what they called in Hannibal a "good provider."
But very soon the clear violet eyes which had been a cause of her parents' selection of a given name for her perceived things which made Violet uneasy. At first, for some weeks and months, the episodes were such as had really nothing whatever to do with her blonde and fluffy self. But they grew more and more perplexing, confusing, distressing. And finally she herself became personally involved.
Peculiarly enough, although she understood that her uncle's new business was prospering, it appeared that Anne considered it necessary to give piano lessons. She accepted only girls-mere children for the most part-and she exercised a certain care in the selection of her pupils.
Each of the eight or ten lassies whom sooner or later Violet saw in the little sitting room running scales or playing simple selections under Aunt Anne's supervision was physically attractive. Obviously Mrs. Bryce wished her music students to do her credit in looks, if not in musical attainment.
There was no doubt whatever concerning the reality of Anne Bryce's skill as a pianist or as a teacher of the pianoforte. But it was an amazing thing to Violet to discover that apparently she had no desire to secure pupils of promise in the field of music.
Twice, in the early stages of her aunt's new enterprise, the girl saw homely children who apparently had talent and some training turned away on the pretext that Mrs. Bryce had already accepted all the disciples she could attend to.
There was a lull in Violet's business activities at this time owing to the absence in the Orient of James Dick, head of the concern, whose private stenographer she had already become. Very kindly he had recognized the effectiveness of her work by granting her a practical vacation during his absence.
All that she had to do was to visit his office each week day morning and look after his mail, turning business communications over to the proper recipients and following directions given her by her employer with regard to other letters-performing, in short, the duties of a confidential private secretary, which she really was.
Most of her time became her own-and it was with the glee of a child that Violet, who had been working very hard and very effectively, found herself for some weeks a person of leisure.
There were many things she intended to do. She would bolster up her scant wardrobe by making for herself a pretty dress or two and some really nice under things. She would allow herself the rare treats of little trips to beaches and to woods. She would gladly spend considerable time also in helping her aunt about the housework.
Aunt Anne was nothing loath to avail herself of the aid of Violet. In fact, as the days drifted past, the young girl found a very considerable part of the burden of running the establishment shifted to her healthy young shoulders. Good naturedly she acquiesced.
She did not dislike housework-and, besides, her aunt was so busy with other things. With her piano lessons and all, they would have had to employ a servant had it not been for this lucky vacation of Violet's.
This condition of affairs kept her fairly closely confined to the house. And now it was that she began to make stupefying discoveries concerning some of her aunt's methods of musical instruction.
There was a brunette child of fourteen, Lillian Barrows by name, who had been one of Anne Bryce's earlier pupils. A dainty and pretty creature was Lillian, with dark brown, bobbed hair and with clear eyes of an odd shade of grayish green.
Passing through the little hall one afternoon as the little girl entered, Violet was surprised at the fervor with which Lillian cast herself on the bosom of her waiting teacher. The two were in a close embrace and Anne was nibbling the soft cheeks of the girl with kisses.
Utterly unconstrained in the presence of her niece-too unconstrained, Violet was beginning to have frequent reason to think-Anne disengaged herself and presented the child to her niece. For an instant the older girl saw a curtain raised in the gray green depths of the child's eyes and an odd little imp-something altogether unchildish peered out at her, as if aroused from sleep by the fervid embrace of Anne.
This was nothing to absorb the thoughts of Violet for long-just an odd child, with a demonstrative affection for her instructor. She went on with the dusting in which she was engaged in the hall and the dining room. She began hearing queer snatches of conversation from the parlor where the lesson was in progress and the door of which stood open.
"Stop, Lillian-play the last passage over-you are playing abominably, you know. You will catch it in a minute," said her aunt in a voice so clear that it was apparent that she had no care whether she was overheard or not Violet heard the child giggle nervously. She did not seem surprised, nor unduly apprehensive.
"Oh, Mrs. Bryce," she said in a lower tone than that adopted by her instructor; "your niece will hear and I shall be too ashamed to-to have her know how you punish me. She is perfectly lovely, isn't she?"
"Yes, she's a dear girl. But never you mind about her. I'm not going to shut off this room to her just because you are here for your lesson. If you dread to have her see anything happening to you, why just you take care not to deserve anything of the kind, that's all. Play that again now-here, I'll mark time for you."
From where she stood polishing the dining table Violet noted with a repressed gasp of amaze the peculiar method adopted by her aunt to mark time for her pupil. Standing behind Lillian she put both her hands into the loose neck of the girl's little dark red gown. They bored within the garment, over the creamy skin of the bosom. On each firm little breast rested softly clasping fingers. The child looked up at her with a flushed smile.
"Play, Lillian," said the woman; "Play carefully now." .
The girl bent to the ivory keys once more. And the fingers which held her round breasts loosened and contracted visibly as she played, in rhythm to the measure of the simple selection on which she was engaged.
There was the sudden jangle of a discord-and almost at the same instant Lillian gave a little soft cry. The jangle was caused by her agitation over this peculiar arrangement for marking time. And the cry was due to the fact that the fingers which surrounded her bare, wee hillocks ceased on the instant their gentle squeezing and pinched with some vigor the soft surfaces which they held.
"Try again. You'd better show more care this time, Lillian, or...."
There was a distinct threat in the teacher's tone. She did not release the young naked breasts which nestled in her palms. Reddened but compliant, the child once more attacked the morceau. And to the time of the fingers alternately compressing and loosening her flesh, she managed to play the bit acceptably.
As a modicum of reward, Anne spent a minute or so in softly caressing the tender mounds which she held, while Lillian, her head falling back upon the belly of the woman who stood behind her, looked upward with happy eyes. When Anne withdrew her hands, letting the soft fabric of the gown rest once more against the girlish bosom, the effect of her touches was apparent in the projection of two stiff, tiny nipples clearly visible.
Mrs. Bryce took a seat beside her pupil. She set before her an exercise somewhat more difficult than its predecessor. She gave her a few words of instruction on this piece-words of warning about certain passages in it. The child attacked it. The teacher's arm surrounded her waist lightly, the hand resting on her chubby behind.
There was speedily a blunder-and again a soft cry from Lillian's lips. For nipping fingers had silently reproved her for the mistake. With rising color she attacked again her task. A flat instead of a natural drew a sharp pinch-and an equally sharp exclamation from the girl, the flesh of whose right buttock had been cruelly wrung between wire fingers.
There were tears, but no rebellion, in the oddly devoted, dog-like eyes which she now turned upon those of the woman. She obeyed the monosyllabic injunction to proceed. But her apprehension led to a series of mistakes-and her progress was punctuated now with cries of pain, though her teacher would allow no pause, but urged her onward.
The child stumbled in a cluster of jangling sounds to the end of the music. She hung her head and turned rosier than ever when Mrs. Bryce arose silently and settled herself in a low chair. No command was uttered that the intent Violet-who had lost not a second's duration of what was occurring in the parlor-could hear from her hiding place in the dining room.
She saw her aunt beckon and she saw the girl arise and, with a strange look of mingled yearning and apprehension in her tear wet eyes, approach the chair. Standing meekly before Anne, she amazed Violet afresh by lifting her short skirt to her waist. There was a pair of bloomers of pink glove silk beneath. The fingers of the teacher assailed the waistline of these.
The garment was loosened and fell. It was drawn off over the sturdy shoes. And, with the creamy skin of her round young thighs and her plump, well developed bottom fully exposed to the watching Violet, the girl slipped forward and lay prone across the broadened knees of the music teacher.
Anne glanced up now and caught sight of the face of her niece peering from her retreat by the adjoining door. She smiled at her. Her own color was heightened. There was obvious pleasure in her eyes and in her expression. It was plain that she hadn't the least objection-rather the contrary-to having Violet see what was going on.
For a moment she let her hands overrun the warm flesh so amply revealed and awaiting her pleasure. Little shivers of the soft muscles, a gentle quivering that showed in wee ripples of the skin and uneasy movements of the thighs and buttocks greeted her petting and her explorations when now they began to invade premises more private and secluded even than what was already in view.
But with fingertips already straying down between the nude, warm thighs, Anne suddenly withdrew them and launched into a spanking of moderate force. The punishment reddened all the half globes of the child's behind. It drew from her lips exclamations of pain and made her sturdy legs toss and part in a way that revealed to the staring Violet a cute, pouting pair of salmon tinted lips between them.
But, to the added surprise of the spectator, Lillian had no word of revolt, nor did she make any effort to escape from her humiliating posture.
Evidently, for some mysterious reason, the little girl was resigned to such treatment. For this was her fifth or sixth lesson, as Violet knew, and yet she had seen with what joy the child rejoined her instructor and how fond she appeared to be of Anne. Lillian had protectors, plenty of them-a father, an older brother-who could and undoubtedly would have resented effectively in her behalf such treatment if she had complained to them of it. Yet here she was, half naked and accepting like a child of six a certainly painful chastisement for a fault which could hardly be said to merit such severity.
Anne halted her slapping blows on the chubby hills of the girl's posterior. She lifted her to her feet and, still holding her little gown up about her waist both fore and aft she swung her about as if accidentally so that she faced Violet. To above the pink indentation of the belly button the child was bared in front.
At the pouting base of her belly of creamy satin was indubitable evidence in the form of a wee growth of dark hair that adolescence was at hand. Lillian, casting wandering, tearful eyes about, caught sight of Violet gazing from around the lintel of the doorway.
"Oh!" she said, "Oh!" And she sought to draw down her all revealing skirt in front.
"Stop it this instant," ordered her instructor firmly. "You mustn't derange me while I'm examining the damage I've done to your bottom."
"Oh, but she's looking-Miss Violet is looking-She's there by the door," exclaimed the child.
"Well, what if she does see you? She's just a girl like yourself-and you were just saying how you liked her," observed Mrs. Bryce. "If it embarrasses you to have her see you undressed and punished, then you can avoid it by being careful not to deserve such treatment."
She smiled once more into the eyes of Violet, as she let the child's clothing fall and shroud her sturdy body once more. Perturbed, and yet weirdly thrilled by what she had seen, Violet departed from the scene to occupy herself with the early preliminaries for the dinner. Just once in the half hour which followed did she return to the parlor door. And then she was first mystified and then horrified. A vision that haunted her, that revolted her-and which, yet, in her dreams for nights to come, recurred with odd fascination-was to be the outcome of her curiosity inspired return to the spot of the music lesson.
She heard her aunt's voice as she drew near and she paused in wonder.
"You shall do this as punishment today-the way you did the first time," said Anne. "If you like to do it, if you are eager to do it, I can't help that. I mean it as punishment for your faults and your carelessness. Go now-get down-right away."
Violet ventured nearer. She heard her aunt idly strumming upon the keys-a medley of Strauss, Liszt, Tschaikowsky. She peered once more about the border of the door. She could see nothing of Lillian, but she could see, as she glanced between the piano and the long bench, that her aunt's knees were widely parted and that under the long black skirt which shrouded them something moved, something large which bellowed out the fabric as if seeking to install itself amazingly in a stupefying seclusion.
Now she could see something of Lillian. For two shapely legs and small feet emerged from the fore to the rear of the beach. The child was sitting on the floor. All of her person save the lower limbs was hidden beneath the skirts of the music teacher. The top of her head raised the fabric of Anne's gown at her lap, between her widely separated thighs.
"What in God's name-what!" was Violet's stammering, inward ejaculation. She was utterly mystified. She saw her aunt, musically impaired, blunder over the keys with white, erring fingers. She saw her cheeks blaze crimson and her eyes rise in apparent rapture toward the ceiling. She saw her slip forward yet more upon the stool and heard soft sounds issue from her parted lips.
Suddenly the veil was lifted before Violet's unbelieving eyes. Mrs. Bryce raised her skirts with both hands. She drew the garments clear up to her waist. Apparently she was overcome by a longing to see as well as to feel. And Violet, gazing between the seat and the piano, was stunned with incredulous horror by what she saw.
Each of Anne's naked, snowy thighs was grasped by a childish hand. The head of Lillian was sunk between the two fine, shapely nude columns. Her lips-the lips too youthful, innocent and sweet for knowledge of guile or guilt-were glued to the woman's crotch.
Even yet Violet did not fully comprehend. But now, as the child drew her head backward a trifle as if for air, she saw that the mouth of Lillian had been pressed directly on the sex of Anne. Its borders gleamed from the moisture of her saliva. The soft lips-tinted a deeper pink than normal now and pouting a little through the effect of the little girl's caresses-held the eyes of Lillian, as they did those of Violet.
Above them was visible a dainty grove of tendrils of a dusky gold. Some of the locks wandered down in tiny curls to the arena of the child's activities. Lillian's great gray-green eyes shone. The tip of her pink tongue projected. It saluted softly the borders of the slit. It ran up and down and all about.
Then, with a muffled exclamation of longing, the little girl parted with her fingers as far as she could the moistened lips and plunged her tongue once more between them. It licked all of the inner portions that it could reach. Then it seemed to find a certain spot-to fix itself there in fervid caresses.
Anne shivered and bent her head to watch as much as she could see of this ministry to her happiness. Her white nakedness trembled with the violence of her sensations.
"That's it, Lillian, that's just the spot-lick, girl, lick, you naughty girl!"
Into the course of her sighs of rapture there began to merge soft moans betokening even greater bliss. Her head began to sway from side to side. She gave a cry of ecstasy-and shook violently.
Violet turned and fled to her room.
CHAPTER TWO
Sensualist and voluptuary from the tips of her carefully kept toes to the crown of her dusky gold head, Anne Bryce, impatient of constraint, made it a principle to "strike while the iron was hot." Nor did she disdain to take measures to heat the iron herself when necessary and possible.
It was her hope and her belief that "the iron," in the dainty person of her lovely young niece, was "hot" at the very instant when, closing her lesson to the complaisant Lillian, she sent the child homeward.
Oddly enough, she and her well mated husband, Joe Bryce, professed and confessed in the privacy of their own chamber a curious and abnormal lust, equally profound on the part of each, for the white body of their youthful niece. Between themselves they had no constraints whatever.
They were "pals" in licentious vagaries, in corrupt and vicious imaginings, in pandering to each other's unscrupulous lewdness, as they were in the bonds of wedlock. Simply as a matter of wily precaution against disclosures and scandals, both of these worthies-and Anne in particular-excelled in sounding out an intended victim, whether infant or adolescent; in spreading little nets of temptation, opening new horizons to juvenile curiosities, and watching for symptoms of aroused interest and yielding, before committing themselves to serious actions along the lines of their burning desires.
In other words, each toy of their lascivious distractions was made to feel herself-and sometimes himself-an accomplice, and each one was carefully studied in advance to insure against instincts toward childish babblings.
In this wise, taking advantage of the prematurely wise impulse toward secrecy in regard to newly learned sexual things which often attends premature revelations of the flesh in the case of precocious children, they had gone their evil way for some years now, and many an innocence had they sapped and drained to nourish their feverish wantonness, without ever a serious setback.
To be sure, there had been rumblings in dear old Hannibal. There had been, toward the close of their stay in the Missouri municipality, queries from the mother of a small boy to the mother of a young girl as to the increasing pallor and languor of both their children and whether it had seemed to mother number two that her child seemed subdued and odd upon her return from a session with her piano teacher, Mrs. Anne Bryce.
There had been muffled comments here and there that some of the frequent absences from his store of Joe Bryce corresponded with the hours when his wife was giving a music lesson to a dainty miss of twelve from a nearby town or to the dusky young daughter of a Hannibal manufacturer.
There had been, too-and this was the great and burning secret of the Bryces, the only real scare they had ever had-an evening call at their home from a man of means who was a pillar of the church which the couple attended.
It appeared that earlier upon that same evening his sixteen-year-old daughter Angela had been discovered in an upstairs chamber with sadly disordered attire and yielding to the curious eyes and lecherous fingers of her thirteen-year-old brother, Louis, all the beauties of her maidenly bosom, her posterior, her smooth belly and-sadder to relate-all the fair region between her two shapely and quite naked thighs.
The girl's own fingers had been happily occupied, when the father had happened in upon them, in obscene dalliance which had for its already successful object the enlargement and hardening of a certain tube of flesh constituting the private property of her younger brother.
There had been quick thinking on the part of the distracted couple-the hardware merchant and his spouse-to avert calamity. For their highly overwrought visitor was a man of substance and of influence, capable of driving them to disgrace and ruin-and his frightened children had given him literal and detailed accounts of this, that and the other occurrence at the home of the Bryces at such times as Mrs. Bryce was giving them a joint lesson at the pianoforte.
From notes methodically scribbled while the young folks stammered out their confessions the man had retold to the consternation smitten Bryces of an occasion when the girl had been led to strip her young brother of his nether clothing and spank him across her knees for some dereliction in his playing during a duet which they were learning for some church affair.
Of how, a few moments later, after the shamed but oddly enraptured boy had sat, still nude from the waist to the socks he wore, and resumed his practice, another fault had led to his outstretching upon his back over his embarrassed sister's lap while, with all his young genitals exposed to her gaze, she had slapped him upon the stomach until all its white expanse was tinted with scarlet.
The man told, too, of a "lesson" in the course of which, while Anne Bryce, sitting between the children upon the piano stool, showed them how certain passages should be rendered, each of them had been caused to suck gently upon the nipple of a fine, firm naked breast, fully drawn out from the concealment of her corsage; of another time when, Angela having been decreed delinquent, Louis had been bidden to deprive her of her drawers, with full leisure and permission to examine all of her person that he uncovered, and of how, by instructions of the music mistress, it was only hours later, at their own home, that, by accepting a spanking at the hands of the boy and allowing him to replace the garment on her body afterwards, Angela had ransomed her drawers.
The father went into detail of that subsequent lesson, the last before the church concert, when the brother and sister, naked as a young Adam and Eve, had played their duet, blind-folded by their teacher so that their "sense of touch upon the keyboard might be tested."
And of how, while they bent their energies to satisfying by their performance Mrs. Bryce, whom they seemed both to fear and to love, they had suddenly felt wandering on their bare bodies, upon their excited intimacies as well as in less sensitive regions, hands-not two hands, but four.
And the father, his face reddened and his eyes glowing as he recounted the stories he had heard, bent here a dark look on Joe Bryce, the man who seemed to have other interests in life besides his traffic in hoes and lawn mowers.
As the visitor ceased his recapitulation and fell back in his chair, as if overcome by his horror, it seemed to Joe Bryce that catastrophe was a mild term for what had befallen. He was silent, his face bent doggedly and sullenly downward. But the quicker witted Anne, who had been, unlike her spouse, capable of thought during the cataract of Mr. Flander's words, thought there might be a way out.
She had noticed signs-tremblings of the indignant father's fingers as he pictured what he had seen in the bathroom, that might not be all of anger; wanderings of his wavering eyes to a carelessly exposed strip of bare skin above one of her stockings as she crossed her shapely legs; a dwelling upon and repetition of details of the most unseemly scenes while his gaze met hers, as if vaguely he gloated over dwelling upon such topics in presence of a charming woman, no matter how deep might be her guilt.
Silence fell. And it was finally broken, not, as Mr. Flanders might have expected, by protestations of innocence on the part of one or the other spouse, but by the soft and calmly interested voice of Anne Bryce asking for still further details.
"Mr. Flanders," she queried, "did you chance to scan at all carefully the body of Angela? I mean, were there marks-signs of ill treatment?"
"Why, I-I can't really say that I...."
The man's stammering voice, fallen to a lower pitch as if influenced by her own tone, dragged and hesitated. He seemed mystified and uncertain of her object.
"Of course," went on Anne, turning her fine eyes upon his and holding him oddly with her gaze; "Of course, it is a father's duty and his privilege, where the mother of his children is dead, to look carefully after them, to examine their bodies once in a while, not to leave to others, however affectionate and kindly may be their motives, to attend to what is really a sacred trust incumbent upon the father.
"I was just wondering-quite without implied reproof of you one way or the other-whether you thought it worth while to study the sweet young adolescent sexes of Angela and of Louis; to see whether that of Angela was flowering into maidenly health, maturity and charm; to see whether the lad's virility gave evidence of proper development; to find out, since you had the suspicions which you have voiced, whether there were signs of any abuse of those parts."
She paused. The glance which she bent upon the now staggered Mr. Flanders, who was groping bewilderedly for a possible motive back of her remarks, was innocent, guileless, friendly. Again his eyes wavered from hers. They fell to where a slim ankle, clad in gray silk, was perched now upon an adjacent knee-with an enticing and confusing, but apparently quite unconscious, revelation of pinky white nudity above blue satin garet bands.
She saw again his clasped fingers tremble lightly. She saw, too, that his lips were sealed to silence on the topic which she wished to launch. She felt handicapped in her desperate effort to avert calamity by making an accomplice of an accuser. The handicap was the presence of her glowering, scared husband.
Joe had seen her expose snowy naked thighs, as if inadvertently, to their unwelcome guest. He had heard her put cynical, apparently purposeless questions. But he had in no way grasped her purpose-her hopes of laying a plank to safety across the chasm which yawned before them.
Although never yet had there been any but youthful and immature participants in the sexual manifestations of Anne and her mate, the mere presence of Joe would have halted her not at all in carrying out her design. But the important thing now was that his presence did halt and silence the burly and florid man who was now stealing glances at forbidden realms beneath her skirt.
There was a quiet word-something about a dying furnace fire. Joe understood. He slunk off, with a muttered apology.
"I want to feel free to speak quite plainly now, dear Mr. Flanders," said Anne. There was warmth in her tone, which constituted insidious flattery to a man already bemused by her soft charm, by the tempting-and chance-display of glowing bare skin. "I want, if I may, to talk to the father of Angela and Louis as one who feels herself their best friend aside from yourself.
"There are, of course, as a man of your acumen will readily have surmised, unintentional but great exaggerations in the confused and startled reports of the dear children. I have, however, felt-I am twice the age of Angela-a certain motherly interest in both of these little ones, who have inherited...."
She raised almost tender eyes to the man's face and quickly let them fall again.
"Who have inherited such-may I say?-such likable characteristics. Each seemed to me-their ages are crucial ones, you know, for budding adolescence-in need of a fond supervision in bodily matters. I took the liberty-it was unwarrantable-I should have consulted you-I meant soon to do so-but you awed me, in spite of-of a certain drawing I felt toward you, I...."
Her soft voice faltered. There were tears in the eyes she lifted. Consummate little actress-with an audience that drank each syllable, that forgot all the discrepancies, all the improbabilities, and thought of reproofs to be administered later to cloudy minded children who had so maligned a friend.
A little foot clad in a bronze pump was lifted now to the edge of a low, broad stool before Anne's chair. It was widely parted from its fellow. The display of lily flesh above gray silk sheaths of stockings became more and more fascinating. In her agitation, the poor young woman was obviously unaware of her exposure. A shy smile ventured into her wet eyes-and she beckoned, with a sudden daring intimacy.
"Would you mind, dear Mr. Flanders, just perching here on this stool quite close for a minute? I want so much to have my very first chat with you quite informally and softly. Joe has a trip to make after he gets through with the furnace; a shopping expedition. But still these are such intimate matters-and I shall feel absolved in advance if I may sit quite close to you and whisper in a sisterly way."
He sat there in a sort of troubled, sensual daze. She made no attempt now to hold his eyes. She knew well the use which he preferred to make of them. As he seated himself on the edge of the stool, the bronze pump which rested on the floor moved farther yet from its elevated mate.
Her brief skirt lay upon her round knees. There were fair scenes beneath his gaze-all the interior sides of two thighs as naked as the dawn-at their apex a glimpse of curling tendrils-and-was it?-as her legs fell yet farther apart, while abstractedly she sought for words with fine eyes downcast-was it a hint, in the semi darkness up there, 'of a pinkness amid the white and the gold-a vertical line of coral?
"You see, dear Mr. Flanders, I feel that such a remarkable man as yourself, with two lovely children, is quite capable of being both father and mother to them. Take the case of that sweet Angela. She is the dearest child. Her shapely little body, as well as her pretty face, should be a source of both pride and a certain anxiety to you.
"Now, when she was nearly nude in that chamber this evening, if you had only thought to take advantage of the opportunity to examine her dainty, firm breasts-to see whether their condition, the aureoles, the nipples, the velvet skin and the consistency of the flesh indicates perfect health.
"You might have petted them and praised them a little-a young and growing girl would be so happy and proud over such paternal appreciation. Why, of course, I wouldn't pretend to set my opinion against your own in this or any other matter, but to me dear Angela's sweet bust appears superb. It really makes me almost ashamed of my own."
She was whispering-a cooing whisper. She was well in her voluptuous role now. Her eyes were bright. Her fingers fluttered about the neck of her light, semi d'collet' corsage.
"If I dared, just for purposes of comparison, to make you see what I mean with you, somehow, I feel different than with any other man-more confident that you will not misjudge my motives-I will-you will not mind."
Her cheeks were pink; but those of the silent man were red, crimsoned with blood whirling, racing through his veins. Deftly, with her eyes shyly upon his face, she bared to his eyes such a bosom as the fair Angela could not hope to boast of for some years to come, if, indeed, ever.
In ecstasy the man fixed with gleaming eyes the delicate but round and firm hillocks, the lily white of their skin traced with soft, wandering lines of blue from the veins beneath. His glance devoured the tiny tips of rosy, erect flesh at their summits, standing forth each in its bed and circle of paler pink.
"They're marvelous," he said hoarsely. "My God, how sweet they are! Why, Angela's-I looked them over--yes, I did-I touched them, too-her breasts are cast in the shade by yours. Will you let me-just to feel the difference ...?"
He extended eager, trembling fingers. His face was bent to within inches of her denuded bosom. Anne gave him a sweet, acquiescent smile and pressed her naked breasts farther forward. His fingers alighted. They pressed and petted and clasped in circling groups each little hill. He gave a gasp of passion-and his lips took the place of his fingers. They pressed each still nipple before he raised his head.
"You'll forgive-you'll understand-I didn't mean...." he stammered.
Anne, for her part, had long ceased to feel her self imposed penance unpleasant. This was a vigorous, virile man, whose children she had made her playthings-as well as, in a limited degree, her husband's. This was the layer of ashes that covered the lava of her passion.
She knew she had conquered-her shallow ruse, puerile though it was, had saved the day. With anxiety banished, she gave her lust freer play. She had not really meant all that was to come when she began, but now, well, it was to come-that was all. And if her voluptuary of a husband, lurking somewhere about, didn't like it-well, that was all right, too.
"Indeed I don't mind your-your sweet tribute," she whispered. "It made me feel all funny. I...."
Once more she let her eyes, bolder now, dwell upon those of Flanders. Impatiently she realized that even now the man needed further encouragement. He was a banker, just a country banker, and no Lothario.
"And did you look more intimately at Angela?" she asked. "You should have inspected-I hope you did-it was your fatherly privilege-her sweet little brown beard down-down here, you know. And you should have looked right in between her lovely naked thighs. You should have seen and touched her wee pink crevice, her big, smooth, firm bottom."
Viciously she fanned her own flaring lust and that of the man by her shameless words. Avidly he drank them in. His flaming face was very near to hers and his breath issued pantingly from between parted lips. His answering whisper, like hers, was lewdly confidential.
"I did-I did touch her there. I sent Louis out and I spread her legs way apart. It was lovely! She was scared. I got very hot. I had to rush out-or else-my God, how do I know what would have happened! Let me, for God's sake, let me see you in there!"
"Why, dear, dear friend-why, since you really wish it-just that you may see how far lovelier is Angela than I can possibly be down, down there."
Her words were a series of whispered, panting breaths. She was in a measure caught in her own trap, but a very willing victim.
She lay back upon the long, low chair. Deliberately she drew her skirt up to her waist. With it in its ascent went the unbuttoned combination which constituted her sole underclothing. Bared from the tops of her stockings to above the little pit of her belly button, she gave her person to his eyes. Her shapely, snowy thighs parted.
His glowing eyes feasted even while his hands were busy with his buttons, his braces, his trousers. The beast in him was rampant now. Nothing-no possible lurker with marital rights, no thought of consequences-nothing could halt him now.
His breeches and his underdrawers fell. His coat and vest were hurled at a sofa. With virility rigid and tense, he fell upon Anne. He penetrated her to the quick. Her thighs clasped him and her arms went about his neck. With a cry of joy she felt at the very mouth of her womb the tip of his long and sturdy rod.
She responded ardently to his assault. Their yoked bodies thrust and quivered in a fiery combat that ceased only when both gasped out their bliss in the throes of the spasm.
"Well, something like this had to come some time," said Joe Bryce to himself, as he peered through a crack beside the door. "God, it's wonderful to watch!"
He fingered his uncovered and throbbing organ.
CHAPTER THREE
And thus, by the sacrifice of wifely fidelity, Anne had drawn both her husband and herself back from the brink of the pit which yawned before them. But this episode, coupled with disturbing rumors that reached them through friends and with looks askance which greeted them, played a prime part in determining their departure for New York.
Side by side were two other impelling motives; Joe's belief that he could make lots of money in the wholesale business and the expectation of the couple that their peculiar joint lust for innocent flesh might find ample and reasonably secure pasturage in Manhattan-and of the two the latter was the more powerful.
Working behind the mask and the rampart of her guise as a professional teacher of elementary musical principles, Anne excelled in drawing into the web any number of more or less carelessly guarded children-and she was phenomenally acute, also, in discerning which were endowed with prematurely awakened or lightly slumbering passions; which would be most readily aroused to delight in sensual maneuvers; which could be depended on to preserve discretion and silence, either lest they should lose the pleasures they had learned to love or through genuine fear of their mistress.
There would be pettings and treats in the cases of the younger ones of twelve or so. There would be mock severities and burlesque punishments, which Anne knew how to render increasingly agreeable by means of furtive caresses. In cases where the frequent characteristic of children of loving to have their nudity displayed and fingered was manifest, the chastisements quickly became more severe and the fondlings grosser and more stimulating.
It was not until Anne had well prepared the ground and then only in carefully selected cases-that Joe was admitted to partake of the feast. As an example of the pleasures which entranced the remarkable pair, there may be instanced the particular episode of Betty Carstairs.
Betty was a robust, auburn locked youngster of fifteen. In no respect did she seem that age, however, for in bulk and height and development of her sturdy body one would have rated her as seventeen at least, while mentally she had about the status of the ordinary youngster of twelve.
She had clear, big hazel eyes, a delicate skin, fine coloring and well formed features and body-altogether a child with considerable pretensions to physical charm.
Her mother, twice divorced and now unmarried, was an actress of a moderate degree of success. Mrs. Carstairs-or, to give her her stage name, Renee Lafitte-was much upon the road. Hardly up to the standard for leads in musical shows while they were playing New York, she was frequently called upon to supplant some principal when the Manhattan run was over and the medley of dancing legs, piping voices and rusty humor moved to Chicago or drifted about the country.
But, not caring to have her daughter dwell in such an atmosphere, she always left the child in care of a distant and rather indifferent old maid relative when she departed with the troopers.
She had herself brought Betty to Mrs. Bryce for the lessons which were desired. And, finding Anne a likable, cultivated and charming woman, she had inquired whether the latter would be willing to tutor the backward youngster in other respects than music, giving her perhaps an hour or two daily.
She offered liberal pay; but it was not that which led Anne to agree so much as the feeling that here was given over into her hands a most attractive and defenseless plaything, with the form of a well developed girl of high school age and the mental status almost of an infant.
There were speedy arrangements made whereby, when Anne so ordained, Betty was to stay at her house for luncheon or dinner, or even to pass the night when evening lessons were contemplated. The child was by no means averse, for, like most youngsters, she had taken an immediate fancy to the smiling and pretty Anne, whose very glance could be a caress.
Anne found the little girl caring by nature and nervously, eagerly, responsive to tactile endearments. There were flushed shrinkings, quickly followed by glad but silent submissions, when the teacher, even from the first day, made it a practice to examine how Betty was clad-for Mrs. Carstairs, having found her aged relative careless in such matters, had said so frankly to Anne, and had thus given her just the opening she craved and would in any event have found.
The girl's wardrobe was complete enough. There were plenty of nice things, for the mother was in no wise inclined to stint in this respect.
There were soft smoothings of the muslin or silk waist over the bosom-where hillocks such as might well have graced the bosom of a girl of eighteen swelled forth. There were unbuttonings of the waist in search of fancied wrinklings of the fine linen or muslin under vest.
There were examinations and praisings of the daintiness of the intimate apparel, divings of soft fingers within the bosom, gropings amid the velvet, bare mounds of the girlish breasts. From these touches Betty shrank at first in childish shame. But the soft voiced praises of her attire, of her person, pleased her, the casual confusing touches brought definite agreeable sensations as soon as her timidity and diffidence were overcome.
She learned soon to await and to anticipate these examinations, to bend her bosom for the expected unbuttonings, not to flinch when her breasts were drawn forth and inspected, to submit with rosy cheeks and downcast eyes when the firm hillocks were clasped and fondled, even kissed and softly licked on white surfaces and pink nipples.
Thus made pliable and submissive to caresses whose charm had quickly won her, Betty was led to submit to equally minute examinations of her nether parts. Her fine stockings were smoothed out on plump calves and round, dimpled knees.
Garters were readjusted beneath the loose legs of the drawers, with much smoothing and petting of silken skin above them, while the child, tickled yet soothed by the touches, laughed delightedly. Explorations of a franker nature soon followed. It was a wholly imaginary spider-and the announcement frightened the child-which Anne's searching fingers followed up one leg of the linen drawers.
In her fear of the supposed crawling monster, Betty took no note at first of fingertips which slipped upward to her crotch, which searched-and sought in vain, despite the size and development in other respects of the girl-for any trace of hair upon the smooth and polished little mound at the base of her abdomen.
It was only when the woman's fingers danced and quivered on the sensitive lips of her bald, wee sex that Betty awoke to the confusing, abashing completeness with which her person was being explored Coincidentally with, this discovery, however, came another discovery that quickly quashed her instinctive and feeble revolt. It felt good-oh, how good it felt! What a dear and lovely woman was Mrs. Bryce! She would ask her mother, when she returned from the west, to pet her as the music teacher was now doing.
No, she must not do that! She didn't quite know why, but she was sure that she mustn't speak to her mother of the matter at all. The drawers were drawn completely from her body. She had not a word of revolt. Astutely Anne Bryce knew what progress she might make at a leap with this chubby and amazingly developed child.
Betty was turned, and turned again. Every curve, each particle of resilient flesh, all the nooks and crevices were scanned and fingered. There were digital caresses-tantalizing, exciting, soothing, penetrating-that drove the lass into sighing, shivering, amazed happiness, but which did not teach her the full, appalling glory of the spasm for which Anne was convinced this immature body was already ripe.
That would come soon. The woman was saving this treat for another than herself-and that other would not use a fingertip to bring about the little girl's convulsions. Now there was a laughing paddling of the soft, warm, swelling cushions of the child's behind. It grew harder, harder and more earnest.
Grieved at first by the withdrawal of Anne's finger from her tiny, hairless cleft, Betty put up a short struggle. Then she began to laugh-and then, as a real stinging sensation grew apace, to whimper and to protest softly. Finally she grew silent. She was conscious of a companion thrill to the one which the finger had caused in her little slit.
It seemed to be located in the same spot, and to absorb and yet enhance the other lovely sensation. A hand crept beneath her smooth belly. A fingertip-a welcome fingertip-rested on her sexual crevice. It parted the lips. The child bore down upon it. She was in a tremor of unsatisfied and juvenile lust. She did not in the least mind now the ringing slaps on her bottom. She wanted that finger once more within her body.
The spanking ended. It required much firmness on the part of Anne to reconcile Betty to the cessation and to force her to go about her music practice. It was with a whispered warning that she had earned another whipping by her laggard compliance, and that she would receive it that very night, that the woman led the girl to the piano.
Betty was to stay over night with her new teacher and mentor. She dined with Anne and with "Mr. Joe," whom she already knew and liked. There was a frolic in the sitting room after dinner. Tickled by four hands, the child rolled and kicked upon the sofa, only occasionally conscious of the fact that her laughing struggles gave the man, as well as the woman, visions of unclad and sturdy thighs beneath the recreant, broad legs of her infantile drawers.
Anne took her upon her lap. She petted her. Both the spouses kissed and endeared her. It was nice to be thus loved and caressed. The woman pressed a drawers leg upward and bade her husband admire and fondle a soft and shapely naked thigh. It must be all right-since Anne was the instigator-thought Betty.
Bed time, it appeared, was an early one. A good night kiss was claimed and gladly given between Joe and the little girl. A complete bath was administered by Anne to the young guest-with divers caresses which made the little maiden glow.
Then there was the spanking still to be received-and it developed that she must await it all naked, while Mrs. Bryce stripped to the skin her fine body under the curious and fascinated eyes of Betty, who gazed furtively at the firm breasts, hardly as big as her own precocious ones, and at the flat, snowy belly with its lovely fringe of dark gold at the base.
She oddly sorrowed when Anne slipped on a nightdress and shrouded her slender nudity. But the undreaded spanking was to come now. Almost feverishly she launched her naked body over the knees of the woman as the latter sat upon the bed.
The blows were soft, almost painless, but the accompanying caresses were fervid and maddening. Fingers dallied with the breasts of Betty. Then they slipped lower and the unfledged sex pouted to their lustful touches. A soft fingertip found the little clitoris-and speedily the child was again in the heaven which she had that afternoon found.
The spanking ceased. The finger left its post, abandoning its mission. Betty would not have it so. Obstinately she clung to her position, outspread with parted legs on Anne's lap. She stammered pleadingly:
"More-please, please more. Just a little bit more." Suddenly the woman took her with both bare arms about the chubby, naked body. She held her thus and, bending, kissed and gently sucked her pink little nipples. Then her lips sought and clung to the lips of Betty.
And upon the instant the child felt herself seized from behind by the bare hips. On naked, silent feet a figure had drawn near, and she had heard nothing of its approach. Her head was drawn down now on the soft bosom of Anne, from which the shrouding nightgown had fallen. Her eyes were snuggled upon the warm, silken skin of the woman's breasts. She could see nothing of what was going on. But, after a startled cry, she clung to her teacher and abandoned herself to whatever was to happen.
Her parted legs were raised. A smooth face pressed forward between them. Hot lips quivered in kisses on the recess where Anne's fingers had earlier played. A tongue emerged-and sighs of rapture arose from Betty's lips as she felt the moist, warm, licking caress upon her secret lips.
The surrounding arms of Anne soothed her and made apprehension vanish. The man, the man-Mr. Joe-he was seeing her all naked. He was kissing her and-oh, heavens!-he was licking her between the legs.
But oh, it was so wonderful, so delightful! Let him do as he pleased. Let him do more-more-more! The tongue abandoned her slit. Oh, why, why did they always stop just when it was making her glow and throb with pleasure!
Startlingly it sought out the vale between her plump buttocks, which she felt strong fingers draw apart. Up and down the warm valley the tongue's tip ran again and yet again. Then it sought out the wee puckered hole of her anus. It tapped and swept and bored. The girl was conscious of a vague new pleasure in this stupefying caress.
Now the instrument of her joy and of her enlightenment returned to her coral slit. The tongue passed between the soft lips, which masculine fingers pressed apart. It found the erect little bud of the child's clitoris.
Now, indeed, did Betty know pleasure-frenzied, glorious pleasure. So stirred were her senses and so absorbed was she in this aching joy bestowed by the tongue buried in her body, that she hardly realized that Anne was moving gently, raising her nightdress, transferring the head of the child, from her bare bosom to her equally bare lap.
Now Betty felt her cheeks pressed by the satin flesh of her teacher's thighs. Her face lay snuggled in a warm nook amid curling, silken hair. Low words of instruction and entreaty were breathed into her ear.
They penetrated her consciousness. It was desired, it seemed, that she should repay upon the person of the woman the caresses which she was receiving from the man. The little girl was nothing loathe. She was half maddened by her sensations. She raised her head a trifle and, as Anne broadened her thighs, Betty scanned with intent curiosity and growing admiration all the mature but attractive sexuality which awaited her ministrations.
She wished now to kiss it. She did so again and again, and with ever growing zest. She ventured forth a timid pink tongue and licked all this dark golden hair, all this white flesh. Now her tongue dwelt caressingly on the rosy lips which parted so invitingly. Its tip entered and strayed wherever it could reach.
Directed by low, earnest words, it touched at length a wee, stiff bud at the top of the channel. There it stayed, tapping and boring and rubbing, until, shaking and murmuring in keenest bliss, Anne gave down the dew of her ecstasy upon the tongue of the happy lass.
Hardly recovered from her spasm, the woman shifted her position so that, reaching a bare arm downward, she could reach and caress the rampant member of her husband. And just as Betty, fairly sobbing with the poignancy of the joy of her first emission, spent on Joe's tongue, he himself shot forth his semen.
CHAPTER FOUR
With the advent into their home of the delicious eighteen-year-old Violet, Joseph and Anne Bryce were for a time more circumspect in their conscienceless pursuit of lewd joys with the juvenile pupils enmeshed in the web of the woman.
This innocent daughter of the man's brother and the woman's sister was of an age more advanced than the children whose purity they had delighted to defile and neither of them had, at first, any idea of seeking to scorch Violet with the flames of lust which consumed themselves.
There was in her intimate kinship-for she was a blood niece of each, as has been said-a certain modicum of protection for this chaste girl hovering on the borders between childhood and womanhood. But such scruples as they had constituted almost her sole safeguard.
For her ignorance in carnal matters, coupled with the devoted affection which she vowed and felt for these, her only close relatives-whom she considered as representing her deceased father and mother in her life-gave her over to them in some respects almost without defense, in case their desires should surmount their scruples.
Commonly, after her stealing down with them, it was in the daylight hours during which Violet was engaged in her work downtown that the apartment of the Bryces was the arena of scenes which might have rendered a Heliogabalas or a Galba envious.
The little bodies which Anne loved to strip for her own delight and to turn over when she felt she could dare it to her spouse for dalliance were almost uniformly so juvenile that not even the least trace of puberty was visible.
It was wee pink clefts set in bald white flesh-it was childish bottoms and the tiniest of puckered anal nooks-to which Joe liked to glue his lips. And it was for Anne the acme of joy to see the face of a child pressed between her thighs and to feel a licking tongue in her slit while, at the same time, she watched her husband indulging his peculiar penchants.
That is what they thought, at any rate. It is what they had always thought ever since, some two years after their marriage, the chance companionship of an already corrupt little girl had given their hitherto concealed instincts a chance to sprout and to develop.
But the presence, at all times save normal office hours, in the little apartment of their enchanting niece could not, it appeared, leave them unmoved by something less chaste than avuncular affection. Their eyes began to dwell upon her in ways which would have brought warning to one less ignorant, innocent and unarmed.
They began to exchange confidences anent her beauty and the effect it produced on them. Violet began to find herself urged to little-and then to greater-intimacies in their home life. She learned to emulate her aunt by passing long evenings in the home circle with nightgown already donned and only a light kimono worn above it, her naked, slim feet thrust into sandals.
She learned that it afforded her loving relatives pleasure if she brought coffee and rolls to their bedside early in the morning thus lightly clad-or even without the kimono-and shared the matutinal refection with them while perched upon their bed. Eager to please them and utterly confident of the purity and kindliness of their impulses toward her, she managed to surmount certain repugnance and to endure rather rough play which she attributed simply to the joviality of two grown up children.
Thus, if her aunt, in mock earnestness, sprang suddenly at her from the bed as she was about to retire after their common breakfast, and wrestled with her in a tangle of flying naked legs well exposed by the recreant nightdresses, while Uncle Joe laughed his applause and encouragement from his pillow, the girl learned not to flush so painfully when she caught her uncle's eyes fixed interestedly upon her slender and delightfully molded thighs, bared almost to the summits at times by her aunt's grappling efforts.
There was an occasion upon which tears came-and the tender hearted Violet, fearful of having given offense to those she loved through her "prudery," apologized for her tears.
Her aunt, triumphantly conquering her in one of these wrestling matches, had managed with a herculean effort of her wiry and sturdy muscles, to raise her and to cast her upon the bed on her face beside her uncle.
In this process, while Anne clutched her about her struggling body from the rear, the nightgowns of both had become so disturbed that that of the woman was raised waist high in front and that of Violet was equally elevated in the rear.
Against the bare flesh of her posterior the girl distinctly felt for a moment the crinkly pressure of a curling mass of hair. Distressed by this contact-the true nature of which she could not fail to realize-beneath the eyes of her uncle, she had struggled the harder, and it had been in a state of the most extreme disarray that she had fallen beside Joe upon the broad bed.
For an instant she lay there breathless and panting.
From the tips of her little toes to above her waist she was denuded behind. The elder pair scanned at will-and their eyes, if she could have seen them, would have revealed to her that they had the will-her fine, broad loins and swelling, round buttocks, her dainty and symmetrical thighs and round calves, the whole covered with a skin of lilies and roses.
Above her, fingers had twitched and eyes had blazed. And before she could even move to repair the shameful disorder of her attire, she had felt hands upon her skin. One-she hoped and supposed it was that of her aunt, even though it seemed a trifle large for that of the woman-lay upon her silken back.
It moved caressingly about, preventing her from righting herself or even from drawing down her nightdress. Another rested confusingly upon her left buttock, and a third began softly to paddle her upon the right cheek of her bottom.
"A spanking for the naughty girl-who brought coffee to her poor old bedridden folks which wasn't strong enough," intoned her uncle above her head. His voice sounded oddly hoarse, as if he was agitated. Well, if he wasn't agitated, Violet certainly was.
She was a creature of sensitive modesties, even if the fine flower of her physical reticence's was beginning to lose lie least bit of its perhaps too scrupulous freshness under the peculiar regime to which her relatives had recently submitted her.
It appalled her to know that she was lying with all her backside-she thought of it as shameful, this beautiful part of her body-fully in view of her uncle and aunt, and to feel their hands upon her. She struggled afresh-and felt two hands, a small and a large one, hold her in position by pressing upon the small of her back, while the mates to these hands belabored quite painlessly each one of her buttocks. She relaxed and yielded, and tears of mortification flowed down her cheeks. Her uncle caught sight of the evidences of her grief. He signalled to Anne. The rough play ceased and her nighty was drawn down.
"Sorry to have made you feel badly by our childish fun, Violet," said her uncle stiffly. "Your aunt, I know, joins in my regrets."
That was all. But it was sufficient to drive the girl to acute unhappiness and self reproach. What? She had hurt the feelings of these dear people whom she loved and who formed her own family? She had let her shyness and aversion to such physical frankness-foolish, no doubt, from their viewpoint-distress them, quench their high spirits, form a tacit reproach for what they meant and thought of merely as fun?
She had led her uncle to speak coldly to her, subjected him to the embarrassment of apologizing, made both of them perhaps love her less? She was ashamed and repentant upon the instant. She slipped from the bed and stood by its side in her long nightdress, a picture of glowing, lovely contrition.
The steps they took were subtle and wily, even if more and more brazen. They knew they had here no small girl with whom, having once assured themselves of her discretion and her budding sensuality, they could leap at once to their goal. They must go slowly in order not to scare entirely from their clutches this fawn with the big, dark blue innocent eyes and the trim, lovely body of snowy satin.
But Violet learned now to acquiesce with a flush when her aunt drew her into the bed between herself and Joe for an hour's chaffing chat in the morning when there was time. She did not resent a pair of hairy, masculine legs and another pair of silken feminine ones, mingling with her naked limbs beneath the coverlets. Casual, petting hands from either side could wander over her smooth, bare shoulders and arms, could venture downward a bit under cover of jesting conversation having nothing to do with what was going on-and touch briefly the soft, warm hemispheres of her bosom without her seeking to voice a protest.
Fingers could stray under the covers and, by merest chance it appeared, rest lightly and then pettingly on the nudity of her thighs beneath the borders of her nighty pushed upward by intruding knees from either side.
Exposures began to occur-exposures more and more audacious-and these, too, she became habituated to countenance. It was her aunt's sudden curiosity concerning the relative proportions of her own limbs and those of Violet that caused Uncle Joe to quit the bed and, returning with a tape measure, carefully compare the dimensions of his wife's fine calves and knees and thighs with those which Violet blushingly allowed to be measured by the man's deft and happy fingers.
There was a summons of Joe one evening by Anne to enter Violet's chamber and to "see how sweet the dear thing looks in this lovely crepe de chine combination." And Joe, rushing thither, found a crimson cheeked maiden, surprised by her aunt's action, standing in the middle of the floor quite bare save for a translucent garment of a mauve tint, and, in view of its transparency, shrouding with both her hands the region at the base of the white abdomen which shimmered through the fabric.
There was a calm irruption one day of her uncle into the bathroom where she sat immersed in the clear water of the tub. For a long minute he lingered telling her some anecdote and seemingly unconscious of her brief, embarrassed interjections and of the fact that one round bare arm was cast over her naked breasts and the other hand had perched on her genital regions.
She began to be invited to join them in their couch at night-"for a little chat and a box of dandy chocolates, if you're not too sleepy, Violet dear." Oddly enough, her repugnance to these intimate reunions had so far vanished that she ran gladly, on bare little feet and clad in her thin nighty, to nestle between her relatives and to undergo the pettings she knew would ensue.
Hands-oh, those agitating hands-now touched with increasing freedom and enlarging zones of action. Her breasts were sought out, drawn from their refuge, patted, fingered, praised and kissed. She was laughingly rolled upon her stomach beneath the bedclothes-and, unresistingly now, allowed her sole garment to be raised to her shoulders and, in consequence of some discussion, endured upon her nude behind a spanking of some severity.
Turned again upon her back and consoled with chocolates and kisses, she found her attempts to lower the veil of her nightdress to its normal position ineffective. Bare arms-one brawny and hairy, the other round and soft-lay across her bared stomach.
The attached hands wandered in petting touches more confusing than ever before. Fingers took her tiny nipples-and stiffened them by soft touches. Fingers strayed all over the warm plain of her belly. Other fingers-she could only hope they were all those of her aunt-seemed curious as to the extent of her genital growth.
Her soft ringlets of pubic hair were gently explored and softly tugged. One finger sank lower, pressingly ventured-ah!-she squeezed together her firm thighs against its further advances. She strove to speak-and found only a gasping sigh emerging from her lips. She lay back and threw bare, snowy arms over her scarlet face.
Her uncle and her aunt lay upon their sides facing the white body of their niece. They pressed closer. Upon one naked hip she felt the pressure of the crisp net of Anne's genital growth. On the other-heavens!-how hard and long and smooth it was! It seemed to sink into her soft flesh, almost to bum her.
They were almost lying upon her now. Her nighty was rolled up to her throat-and so, apparently, were theirs. She gave a little cry of dismay. It was so awful-such a terribly fleshly joke which these dear relatives of hers were perpetrating now. Yet, from beneath her parted fingers, she saw that each was smiling.
It must be meant as just a joke, perhaps to test her vowed anti-Puritanism resolution. But she couldn't stand it-she couldn't. In a minute they would see how foolishly her nerves were shaking, how excited in unmaidenly wise were her emotions. She tried to twist from under the pressure of their bodies.
"Please, Aunt Anne-please, Uncle Joe-I, I feel so funny. I'm afraid I'll faint. I'd better go to my bed please, mayn't I?"
Suddenly, just as Violet, recovering her self-control, was about to leap from the bed, Anne rolled upon the body of the perturbed child. Lying with satin belly and warm thighs pressed to the uncovered body of her niece, the woman breathed softly in her ear:
"It was too warm for you, lying buried between us that way, Violet darling. You shall lie on the other side of me where your naughty uncle can't bother you any more with his pestering. If he wants to frolic he'll have to take it out on his poor wife."
As she spoke she slipped down between Joe and the girl, while Violet mechanically moved aside to afford her room. And, drawing down her nightdress to shroud her person once more, she became the witness of "frolics" more and more astounding and confusing. Unwilling to rush away, at first because she knew that thus she would offend her uncle and aunt, and later because her interest grew until it reached the point of hypnotized and feverish attention, she saw the pair roll in each other's clinging arms with an affectation of play which would have deceived no one except an inexperienced and innocent tyro like their young niece.
She saw them haul each other's night array off and toss it to the floor. Her face one glow of rosy blood, she noted their hands wandering shamelessly. She observed that ever and again her aunt's fingers clutched the great object at Joe's crotch and that her own privacies knew the invasion of his hand.
In the course of their feigned wrestling, the man put his wife prone upon her back with his stalwart body lying across hers. He spread her willing legs-and he revealed with a lustful smile to the staring, shamed eyes of Violet the dainty coral cleft.
"It's sweet enough to kiss, isn't it?" he murmured to the girl. "Let's kiss it, you and I, while I've got her down like this. It'll serve her right for showing it so saucily."
His outstretched hand pressed on the back of Violet's neck gently. Before she could realize the real portent of his words, she found her face within inches of the rosy lips of her aunt's sex. Abashed and shocked, she made a feeble effort at withdrawal, but her great eyes devoured the curling growth of duskily gold hair, the lovely channel between the widely separated legs, the cherry portals of the slightly yawning crevice.
Never before had she seen the privacies of one of her own sex thus clearly. Amazed at her own sensations, she found this delicate spot attractive, charming, tempting. She let her head be pressed further, without resistance. And, burning with blushes and quivering with confused pleasure, she pressed a shy kiss full upon her aunt's slit.
"You darling-oh, you darling girl!" she heard Anne gasp joyously. "Your tongue, dear child, your lovely tongue-give me that, too."
But, ablaze with horrified shame at what she had done, and that, too, under her uncle's eyes, Violet had raised her head. She watched with startled eyes while, after gluing his lips to the sex of Anne in a fiery kiss, the man took her once more at full length in his arms. He lay upon her with his great, throbbing shaft at the portals of her sex.
But his wife would not have it so. She wished to give the trembling neophyte by their side a different and a clearer spectacle. She whispered in his ear. He allowed himself to be dislodged from his position on her body by the renewed semblance of a struggle. He slipped upon his back and triumphantly Anne bestrode him.
"I'll pin him down, the rascal," she gasped out, turning her pink cheeks and flaming eyes upon Violet. "I'll teach him to be disrespectful to ladies who are unfortunate enough to be abed with him-with that great thing of his jamming about all over the place. I'll put it away for him and he'll be lucky if he ever gets it back again."
She was as good as her word. Under the terrified but entranced eyes of the absorbed Violet she took in her fingers the upstanding member of Joe and placed its tip at the lips of her slit. She bore down and forward. It slipped between the borders. Slowly it sank within until it had entirely disappeared and the hair of their genitals mingled in a bi-colored mattress of tendrils.
It was a flaming bout between two healthy and lust maddened persons at which Violet, all her senses reeling, looked on. That is to say, she looked on for a while. But when Anne, wildly spending as she felt Joe's tool spurt its essence within her body, sank forward and turned her glazed eyes upon Violet, she saw that the girl had fallen prone upon her buried face and was shaking in all her body almost as if she herself had been a participant in the communion of flesh.
CHAPTER FIVE
There could be no doubt of the inflammation of the virginal senses of Violet in consequence of the scenes to which she had been initiated and the experiences which she had undergone at the hands of her uncle and her aunt.
Nevertheless, in consequence of something utterly unforeseen by them-and, indeed, entirely unknown to them-they now encountered mystifying and distressing obstinacy on the part of the child in attempts to carry forward and to consummate their ultimate designs.
For, as intimated earlier, Violet-the shy and confiding Violet-had found a confidant and advisor outside of her home circle. This was James Dick, her gray haired, fresh faced employer, who, it had become manifest, had taken a great personal liking to his efficient and decidedly attractive stenographer, now promoted to the post of secretary as far as her actual duties went.
It had been easy for the middle-aged business man to observe that something was weighing upon the mind of the dainty and open hearted Violet. It had been child's play for him, who had already by kindness won her affection and whom she held in a species of awe, to gain her confidence and to draw from her lips little shamed confidences anent the kind of episodes which were worrying her.
He led her to speak more and more freely as the days went by-to unbosom herself to him as she could hardly have been induced to do into the ears of a woman, so great was the trust he inspired.
Thus he had learned of her experiences in the chamber and upon the couch of her relatives almost in full detail within a few hours of their occurrence.
Tactfully he had known how to induce her to become explicit to a greater and greater degree. And now these almost daily narratives of the most suggestive variety, falling from sweet lips like rose petals and enhanced by embarrassed violet eyes which found it difficult to meet his, had become the most delicious of treats to the man.
He led her to repeat in fuller detail, pretexting that thus only could he find it possible to advise her adequately. His mind revelled in the subtle joys of hearing from virginal sweet lips such tales. And some way, the flame in his nature finally set fire to hers.
She found herself now even looking forward to that secret hour with her elder friend and employer when she should breathe into his ear the account of her latest petting bee with her aunt and uncle. She let herself be taken like a child upon the lap of the happy man for these confidences.
And as she told of liberties being taken with her nudity, of hands that perched here and there, of lips that followed the wandering fingers, she learned to watch for the increased flush upon Mr. Dick's face and for a gleam of passionate interest in his brown eyes.
Peculiarly enough, his mood would then become hers. She would feel in all her nerve centers the pleasing heat of shamed passion at confiding such things to a man. She came in time not to resent his own wandering touches, soothing her qualms with the belief that they were quite paternal and innocent.
Her senses, aroused by her morning or evening s'ances in the nuptial couch of her relatives and stimulated anew by thus recapitulating her experiences, found a morbid relief-even though the agitated child would not face the facts and admit to herself any sensual motives in her seeking thus the "advice" of Mr. Dick-in appearing to be unaware of his fingers caressing her firm breasts and her fine thighs through her clothing. There came a day when, while she breathed into his ear the tale of having been scanned naked by her uncle and aunt, of having seen them in the same state and finally of looking on in fear and yet in fascinated surprise while the pair yoked their bodies in the sexual combat, she felt her employer's fingers slip downward over her short skirt to her stockinged knee, and then upward again until it perched on the soft bare skin of her thigh.
Speechless, she paused trembling in a sort of distressed pleasure. He paid no attention to her evident agitation, but urged her onward in her narrative. As she gathered sufficient self mastery to obey his request that she tell of how she had been affected by what she had seen, his fingers slipped all about on her polished naked skin.
They added to the sensual glow which her narrative caused her. And when he caused her to admit, with her face hidden upon his shoulder, that when her uncle and aunt had sunk in gasping bliss at the close of their copulation she herself had-as she childishly put it-"wetted" herself, she felt the man's fingers take a liberty even more pronounced than any Joe or Anne had taken with her young body.
Sighing in ecstasy upon his shoulder, she let him have his way. And the soft tip of his forefinger was moist with the dew of her discharge when he withdrew it and laid the quivering girl upon a sofa to recover her senses.
It will be difficult of belief-and yet such is the fact that even her discoveries of the effect upon her venerated employer of her tales and his obvious joy in browsing upon her own awakened passions did not rob the child of any of her confidence in the man as one to whom she might turn in her dilemmas.
It had been obvious to him from the outset, of course, that Violet would not escape with mere ocular pollution from the web woven for the virgin by her lustful relatives. Yet his advice, which she took as an order, had consistently been thus far that she have no quarrel with her aunt and uncle for matters of such relative unimportance.
He even encouraged her to responses of glad acceptance to invitations to the couch of the older Bryces. Thus he provided fresh fodder for the senses of the girl and of himself.
"You see, little Violet," he would say; "a young girl must learn the things of the flesh in order to be armed against danger. Your dear relatives may, in the excess of their feelings, seek some day to go so far with you that your whole future life may be imperiled. But if you keep me constantly posted, I shall try to avert the danger when it threatens."
It was upon his return from his brief trip to the Orient that James Dick, warmly welcomed by Violet, found her palpitating with a tale which she had to tell him. Perched upon his knees in his private office, she told of what she had seen three days earlier between her aunt and little Lillian Barrows.
"Lillian kissed her between the legs for the longest time," she whispered. "The child seemed mad about it. I saw her tongue come out and enter-and it moved all about. Aunt Anne was so excited. She pulled her clothes clear up to her waist. She hid nothing from me. And yet, as I know perfectly well, she was aware that I could see."
"Well," observed the interested and excited man, his hand slipping within the bosom of the child's gown and taking possession of her bare breasts; "you yourself once kissed your pretty aunt in that same place, didn't you?"
"Yes, I did," admitted Violet, her face aflame; "I told you all about how it happened at the time. I couldn't help it. Uncle Joe was pushing my head down-and she was, oh, so pretty there. I seemed to be unable to keep from kissing her. But it was only a little bit of a kiss."
"And hasn't she ever tried to get you to repeat the caress more earnestly and at greater length?" queried Mr. Dick.
"I'm just going to tell you, dearest friend," said Violet. It was thus that he had taught her to address him when they were alone together. "But you're making me feel so-so funny and kind of trembly-I...."
Her dainty nipples had stiffened under the assault of his fingers. She was trembling. She was filled with passion. It was lovely to have him with her once more.
"I have kissed your sweet lips, Violet," said the man. "Don't you think that just a little kiss here, on each of these lovely little hills-just to show you're really glad to see me once more?"
The child made no reply. Her face hidden on his shoulder, she fumbled with the buttons at her bosom. One snowy breast, its nipple distended, emerged into view-and then its mate. He spread soft kisses all over the warm, sweet mounds. Gently he kissed and sucked each coral tip.
"Leave them out, dear," he said, "so that I can enjoy their beauty while you tell me what happened after the child went away the other day."
"Well, Aunt Anne found me in my room," said Violet, "I had run there after I saw what Lillian was doing. I was on my bed face downward. She came and hugged me and kissed my cheek. She said: 'Darling Violet, you made me so eager to be kissed there by that lovely soft kiss you gave me, you remember, when we were all in bed together? And then you never did it again-and I kept dreaming about how glorious it felt. And I soon saw that little Lillian wanted to pet me that way. It seems her mother taught her to kiss her there-and now when her mother is away the child is crazy for a chance to kiss a woman between the legs.
"'I guess I was foolish to let her, for she is a regular little vampire. It feels all inflamed-there where her lips and her tongue were at work. See, darling, look and see whether it's all red. You might put on a bit of salve-just to make your Aunt Anne comfy."
"I got up at once, anxious to help her-for I thought she might really be suffering. She dropped her single skirt to the floor and lay upon my bed on her back with her feet drawn up to her body and her legs far apart.
"Oh, dearest friend, she was lovely that way-her white thighs all bare above her black silk stockings and-and
"And what else?" demanded the man smiling. In each of his hands rested one of his prot'g''s bare breasts.
"Why, you know, you made me describe all her body to you several times. All her tawny gold growth at the bottom of her abdomen-and the plump little hill on which it grows-and the pretty pink place in-in between her legs.
"Well, I looked and looked. By her directions I parted the lips with my fingers and looked between them. It was too pretty, dearest friend. I was all shivery and I had the most awful impulse to...."
Her eyes sank and her sweet lips trembled right at his ear in the breath of a whisper:
"I wanted to kiss it again."
"You weren't to be blamed for that," he said. "I haven't a doubt that it looked tempting enough to eat. But I'm sure that right in this room with me at this instant is such an adorable little spot as would make that of your aunt seem commonplace by contrast. I think I'll see it, Violet darling. I haven't ever. I, your best friend...."
The child gasped and trembled on his lap.
"Oh!" she said, and again, "Oh!"
"And I want you to invite me to look at you there, Violet. I hope you are going to afford me the keen joy of hearing you say that you wish me to look at you between the bare legs."
"Oh, my dearest friend," said the girl in confusion. "How, how can you!"
"Others have seen you there, haven't they, Violet-your uncle and aunt?"
"Yes," admitted Violet; "but only a passing glance-and not really between the legs-just-just outside-and I never had to invite them. I don't really believe that either of them ever saw the-the very spot that you mean."
"Well, am I to be the first then?" smiled Mr. Dick. "Am I to hear from your lips the words I have asked?"
The child hung her head. Then her eyes sought his face.
"You may," she whispered.
"I may what?"
"You may look at me, if you wish, between the bare legs."
She was a flare with passion even amid her confusion. And the man carried her to the sofa and, laying her on her back, raised her lone skirt to her waist, denuding from navel to stockings the fairest of virginal bodies. He parted the close pressed, slim and snowy thighs and gazed his fill at the tiniest and most enticing of wee crevices.
Finally, pressing upon its rosy border a hot kiss, which made Violet fairly jump and murmur out her shamed pleasure, he lifted her again, resumed his seat in his chair and perched the girl bare of bottom and thighs, upon his lap. His fingers wandered and took their toll of all this silken skin.
"Go on, Violet darling," he said.
She snuggled into his arms and contentedly enjoyed the play of his fingers upon her nudity. No longer did she feel the least shyness about confiding to him in the most explicit language details of the scene which had so nearly resulted most seriously for her.
Indeed, she was finding it most pleasant to feed their mutual passion with descriptions which gained added indecency through the mere fact that they came from so innocently curving a pair of rosy lips.
"There was no inflammation that I could detect," she said. "I told Aunt Anne so and, resisting the impulse that I just mentioned, I was about to rise from my kneeling posture between her legs when she half rose from her reclining position and laid her hand on my head. 'Just a little kiss, Violet dear,' she said; 'I do so want to feel your mouth there once more."
"Well, dearest friend, I humored her. I did it to please her. And after the first kiss I repeated it to please myself. The tender, perfumed lips of her rosy cleft felt so soft and warm and altogether seductive against my mouth. And somehow the mere thought of how shamelessly I was acting in kissing her in such a secret nook added to my agitated longing to give her and myself this indecent pleasure. Finally, abandoning myself to the yearning that overwhelmed me, I showered all her privacies with warm kisses.
"My lips wandered upward, downward, all about. And finally, yielding in a frenzy to her sighing, moaning plea of 'Inside, darling Violet-inside, please-please do, dear,' I let my tongue slip from between my lips and glide up and down along the coral cleft. I parted the lips at last with my fingers and began to lick the inner portions of Aunt Anne's sex as far as I could reach.
"She was writhing and groaning with pleasure as she felt the prostitution of my tongue in such a base use. I was bitterly ashamed-but I was too crazed with a weird enjoyment of what I was doing to be capable of stopping. I loved the sleekness, the moisture, even the scent of the passage I was licking.
"I remember thinking I should have to confess to you later what I had done-and wondering whether it would excite you, whether you would reprove me.
"Almost sobbing with pleasure, she gasped out some directions, which I caught and heeded. The tip of my tongue found the wee, stiff bit of flesh at the top of the passage just inside the entrance. I tapped it and licked it more and more ardently. She shook and moaned in ecstasy-and as for myself I was so lost in the odd joy of my humiliating acquiescence-in her vicious desires that when I now felt myself clasped about the hips from behind I made no effort to resist but devoted myself with ardor to my task.
"I knew it was my Uncle Joe who held me. He had caught me in as mortifying a position and employment as ever a girl allowed herself to be betrayed into.
"But only physical force would at the instant have caused me to stop. Dimly I realized that he was unfastening my skirt at the waist. He lowered it and drew it off, raising one knee at a time to permit of its passage. He attacked now my waist-and, fearing in my madness only one thing, namely to be obliged to stop my caresses on my aunt's person, I yielded my arms to him and let him pull all the clothing from my body save only shoes and stockings.
"All the time I kept my lips pressed to the crotch of Aunt Anne. Naked and kneeling before him, I felt him bear forward against me. Then, for the first time, I realized that he too was unclad. Against my rump I felt the pressure of the distended organ which I had seen perforate his wife on the occasions of which I have told you.
"He lifted the rear of my body somewhat and perched me on all fours. As long as he did not interfere with my licking of Aunt Anne's genitals, I suffered him to have his way. I hadn't an idea of his intentions, although dimly I reflected for an instant that he might be about to assail my virginity.
"That was not for him, dearest friend, and had he attempted such an assault I should have fought. But I speedily recalled hearing both my aunt and uncle declare that I should go to the couch of my husband, if I ever took one, physically intact.
"I was utterly mystified, then, when I felt one of his fingers straying to regions which I had supposed utterly devoid of temptation to any mortal. It pressed upon my-my other opening-in the rear, you know. It seemed to be lubricated with oil or something like that. It penetrated a little way and then was withdrawn.
"And almost immediately it was succeeded in that spot by a warm, smooth, huge something which I knew to be that great tip of his swollen sex. Even then I thought he was only fooling about and rubbing his organ upon my bare body for the pleasure of the intimate contact. But a pressure came. The big hard knob of flesh bore hard upon the aperture. It seemed to gain just a bit of ground. It began to hurt me. I stopped my lingual caresses on my aunt and strove to wrest myself loose.
"But Uncle Joe grasped me forcibly about the waist and prevented me from stirring, while Aunt Anne, rising from her prone posture, pressed my head again forward upon her throbbing slit. 'He won't do you any harm,' she urged hoarsely; 'Let your uncle have his way, Violet dearest. You'll love it, I tell you. And oh, kiss me, lick me, suck me-don't stop, darling-don't stop!'
"It shows the depths of my madness and my infatuation for my aunt's body at the moment, dearest friend, when I tell you that I succumbed for a while. I fell to stabbing and sweeping her hard and excited clitoris again and endured with little moans the further entrance into the shameful and tiny opening of my rear of my uncle's rod.
"Aunt Anne began to tremble and shake in every fiber and muscle once more. And just as she gave me the moisture of her emission on my tongue, I felt a poignant pang between my buttocks. The entire head of my uncle's affair had passed the narrow gates and was imbedded within my body.
"I felt that I could not endure it. It appeared to be rending me. I writhed so violently that I almost dislodged him from my back. My mouth withdrawn from the spot where its task was finished, I devoted all my efforts to avoiding this painful and unheard of outrage in the rear.
"I was unsuccessful, dearest friend. Yes, your little Violet, who loves you so, has been degraded unspeakably. For my aunt, recovering her energies after a moment of quivering bliss upon the bed, sprang up and came to the assistance of my uncle.
"She clung to me and forced me again to the dog-like posture from which I had managed to twist myself. She kissed the tears of shame and pain from my cheeks and whispered words of encouragement into my ear. And Uncle Joe, hurrying to take advantage of her aid, bore forward again.
"The head of his organ gained fresh ground. It bore inward slowly. It did not hurt so badly as before. I could feel it well inside my bowels. It seemed possessed of length and hardness unspeakable. He groaned and puffed and panted with pleasure as he perpetrated his vile assault. The whole standard of his virility was inside me.
"I steeled myself to endure what was now inescapable. Very slowly he began to withdraw-and then to reinsert his shaft in my body. A vague glimmering of pleasure began to mingle with the pain and the feeling of distension. I held my breath and gritted my teeth.
"A definite sensation of growing joy manifested itself. My aunt, seeing me conquered and docile, crouched lower to lick and suck my breasts. Uncle Joe's crisis was at hand. His breathing was stertorous and his shoves so much faster as to revive my pain. And the groans which I could not repress were mingled with his exclamations of burning ecstasy as he shot his jets of moisture into my body.
"After savoring his bliss for a full minute, he slowly withdrew his diminished organ. I had fallen flat upon my face and was almost unconscious. It was necessary for them to carry me to my chamber and to put me to bed. No one-save maybe your own dear self-could have been kinder than were Uncle Joe and Aunt Anne now that the terrible damage had been done.
"But it was only yesterday that I was able for the first time to leave my bed, so nerve shaken was I by the experience. And how glad I was to know that today you would be back here in the office to hear my tale and to tell me what to do!"
Her confession completed, Violet buried her face on the shoulder of James Dick, which had become her refuge in time of trouble. She felt herself lifted and placed kneeling upon the sofa. Unrepining, she endured the parting of her bare buttocks and the minute examination, ocular and digital, of the puckered retreat wherein she had suffered the incestuous and abnormal violation.
"It's the dearest little pink spot, Violet," said the man. "No one would suspect that even the tiniest of objects had been harbored there. It's not in the least inflamed either. And as for the degradation you feel you have endured; well, here's what I think of the degradation-"
And the girl, with a little gasp of astonishment, felt his mouth pressed in a fervent kiss full upon the aperture between the swelling cushions of her bottom. He took the confused but consoled girl once more upon his lap.
"But Violet, darling, I think you had better find a new home," he said. "Unless you are prepared to yield your sweet little body to satisfy this craving of your uncle for an unnatural enjoyment-and perhaps even to let him, sometime when you are both tremendously excited, wrest your virginity from its close retreat-why, you must certainly seek another nest.
"How would you feel about accepting me as your guardian-as your occasional mate in this new nest-as your very dearest and closest companion-as the one who would make your future his very most important concern?"
The girl knew what it meant. But she hadn't an instant's hesitancy. That this man was well over twice her age had no bearing on the matter. She clung to him and lavished tender kisses upon him. She would gladly, and without a single ulterior selfish thought, trust to him her future, her happiness, her-yes, her body, since beyond a doubt he wished to take it.
She had had her maidenly dreams of preserving for a marriage bed the treasure which is supposed to be plucked there-and is occasionally actually found there by some fortunate bridegroom. But if this dear man wished even that-why, it was his.
There was a delay of only a couple of days before it would be possible for Violet to decamp from her abode. Already upon the upper West Side James Dick had a choice and richly furnished little apartment where a recent mistress of his had been installed in luxury. This was given by his instructions certain embellishments.
Violet was to live there. Mr. Dick was to acquire her actual guardianship-a thing which, he knew, with his knowledge of what had transpired as a weapon, would encounter no resistance on the part of the elder Bryces. The girl was to give up her business employment and to devote herself to the development of an unusually sweet soprano voice which she possessed.
As for her guardian-to-be, he would continue to dwell, as heretofore, at the Biltmore, but she would see, he promised, so much of him that she would have no chance to get lonesome or forlorn. Hastily he procured for her dainty wearables of the richest but most tasteful order.
Other things-a car, jewels and the like-would come later. But on the very morning when she slipped for the final time from the portals of her former home and Mr. Dick, awaiting her around a comer in his swift runabout, whisked her up the Drive to her new nest, he placed upon her finger an emerald of such marvelous clarity and radiant, verdant fire that the beauty loving girl was silent with joy He installed her in the charming apartment. They breakfasted happily together there on viands prepared by a capable black maid. Then, kissing her fondly, the man departed for the office, with the reassurance that mid afternoon would see his return to her.
CHAPTER SIX
For hours Violet, absorbed in the novelty of her new life, in the vistas of unending pleasures that opened before her; travel, the opera and theatre, jewels and fine raiment, luxuries of every description, was as happy as can be imagined. However, as the hour for the arrival of James Dick approached, she caught herself oddly distraught and even melancholy at times.
It was not that she dreaded his companionship. On the contrary that had become very dear to her. She was like a lost child, deprived of parental affection and guidance, in his absence. Nor was it the fact that she knew there would be physical relations more intimate than ever before between them, although naturally she had a certain dread of the process which would deprive her of her claim to maidenhood.
It was rather the feeling that she had sold herself-that she had been bought for a price, and that that price was the new and enticing life which awaited her. She had suddenly the conviction that, doing as he pleased with her in return for lavish expenditures of gold, the man could not fail to regard her with a species of contempt, even though that feeling might be buried beneath his usual kindness and merriment.
The thought hurt-it hurt terribly. Not until just now had it occurred to her that her escapade might be viewed thus coldly and commercially. Her warm, impulsive, childish affection had been given to her employer quite spontaneously. Her passionate nature had been aroused by his insidious and sensual campaign.
He was a lovable, fine looking man of middle age who would, she had always felt, have made such a perfectly adorable father. She had been happy, not so much to escape from the hothouse atmosphere in which she dwelt with her uncle and aunt-Whose perverse maneuvers had, to say truth, given her many a delightful thrill of shamed happiness-but at the thought of making her home and living her daily life with this kind and pleasant man.
But she felt suddenly that she could not bear the idea that Mr. Dick should consider her-as it seemed certain that he must-in the light of a purchase; of a girl who, in exchange for what his money would bring her, would tender him such privileges as he wished.
It revolted her, and it brought her near to tears. She came to a firm decision. He should take her and do as he pleased. And then she would doff all this splendor, lay aside all these lovely expectations and return to the comparatively humble surroundings in which she had dwelt.
Then he could not fail to realize that she had had no purely venal and selfish impulse whatever in the matter-that he was receiving from her as a glad gift all that she had that was most precious and irreplaceable.
She was cheered by the plea. He would be grateful and happy-not at all because of the saving it would mean for him, because she knew how generous was his nature-but because of the irrefutable evidence that she held him in such deep affection. He would love her the more with all thought of her possible self seeking utterly eliminated.
He came-and he was surprised and alarmed to find a rather pallid little miss instead of the excited and happy child whom he had expected. She came to his outstretched arms slowly, instead of with the glad bound which he had promised himself. He kissed her softly on either cheek and then held her face between his palms and gazed into her eyes.
Those cerulean lamps were dim and rather sad-but as he looked inquiringly into their depths he saw with relief a little glow arise in their blue pools.
"Well, miss, might an old family retainer inquire solicitously just what is the matter?" he said, as he drew her to his lap.
His presence and the clasp of his arms furnished comfort. But she must tell him right away. She could not leave him an instant longer under the impression that he had purchased her. With her soft arms about his neck she broke into a confused and hurried murmur. He saw tears in her violet eyes. She could not stay-she could not live with him, as had been planned.
Silently her eyes pleaded with him to understand. Under the palm of his clasping hand he felt her heart flutter and palpitate. He saw that she was really suffering-and he held her the more tenderly and kissed her brow softly.
"Want to put your coat right on and trudge back to uncle and aunt, eh?" he said.
There was a moment of silence. The girl's face was snuggled on his shoulder. Then he caught a faint whisper.
"Only-only afterwards."
There came a glimmer of enlightenment to the man. He questioned the child with tenderness and with careful avoidance of mockery. And he drew out the whole story of her afternoon cogitations. She couldn't endure it that he might think she was his just because of what she might get in the way of worldly benefits from him.
"Ah yes, I see," he observed thoughtfully. "And suppose I told you, dear, that I couldn't possibly endure the idea of your conferring on me a gift too great for any prince of the earth to deserve. Suppose I confided in you that I needed your loving, happy companionship to keep my life from being a chill and dreary thing, and that nothing which I could possibly offer you would be able to wipe out my indebtedness to you for that boon.
"Suppose I told you that I was ashamed of the relative pettiness of material things when balanced against the marvels which your comradeship can bestow. Suppose I let you know that I hadn't an idea of lowering you to the level you fear by allowing you to lavish your virginal treasure upon me and suppose I begged you not to take from me the dear delight of your presence-what then?"
The girl trembled with sheer happiness in his arms.
"Oh, dearest friend!" she said. "I would stay with you so gladly-and be just as little nuisance as I could contrive."
He ran his fingers through the silken gold of her hair. He kissed chastely once more the soft cheeks. And he, who had so often flared with passion at the tales which he had led her to tell, who had encouraged her to accept experiences of a licentious nature so that he might savor indecencies falling from a pair of curving, rosy lips, who had subjected her sweet body himself to unseemly contacts-he felt certain that only just now had he portrayed to her or, indeed, realized himself the true state of his feelings toward her.
They had dinner at the Park Lane-mainly because James Dick wished to introduce her to the joys of poulet aux champignons et truffes as there prepared. There was a box at the Lyric later and many a laugh at the unsmiling Harpo and Groucho.
Then there was a little supper at one of the more select of the night clubs-all new and fascinating experiences for the entranced girl. Champagne was procurable at the night club-and it was accordingly procured. Violet knew nothing of the agreeable beverage save by hearsay. She drank it happily just because it was set before her and because her companion drank it.
Ignorant of her entire inexperience with wines, Mr. Dick allowed her to indulge a bit over freely in the insidious fluid-and was surprised suddenly to observe that she was just a wee bit tipsy and entirely sleepy.
His car was summoned at once and they were deposited at the regal portals of the apartment house on the Drive. He had contemplated leaving her in her new quarters and returning to his suite at the Biltmore. But the child was swaying on her little feet when they reached the apartment-and at the quiet words which announced that he was going to depart she reached for her discarded wrap and, entirely unconscious of propriety or impropriety, silently indicated that "whither thou goest I will go."
She didn't understand why they had come all this way uptown if they were going away again immediately. But it didn't matter. She hadn't evidently the slightest idea that he could contemplate leaving her alone and beneath a strange roof.
Quietly he managed to get his thought into her rather fuddled brain. She stumbled toward him, aghast at being left alone by her dearest friend, and cast herself upon his bosom.
"Please, please would you leave me? I'm afraid without you-anywhere," she pleaded.
"Well, dear, I'll stay and tuck you safely away in bed," he said. "And tomorrow morning I'll come early and we'll have breakfast together. Run along and get into your nighty and call me when you are ready."
He meant what he said. He was adamantine in his resolution. He had visions-since he himself was just a bachelor voluptuary-of giving the girl at the altar some time later to some bright faced young fellow truly worthy of her tender heart and her fine nature, uncontaminated as yet even by experiences such as fall to the lot of few maidens.
Silently submitting now to his will, Violet went to her room. James waited long for her summons. Minutes passed-twenty of them. He entered the little hall to listen at her door, thinking that, slightly inebriated as she was, she might have fallen asleep.
The door was ajar. Through the broad crack at its side he saw Violet sitting in the middle of the floor. Her short skirt was pressed up into her lap. One slim leg, bared from toes to the summit of the lily petal thigh, lay outstretched before her. Half unbuttoned, the cerise silken gown hung from her snowy and lovely shoulders.
Solemnly but with obvious difficulty, she was struggling with the fastenings of the long side garter which attached the remaining stocking just above the knee which was raised beneath her chin.
She caught sight of him and smiled.
"It's a pesky thing, Guardy," she said. He liked her affectionate diminutive of his new title as her guardian. "I can't make it. I had the most awful time with the other. Please, will you? I'm so tired-and my fingers are so trembly-and I tore my dress."
She was as unconscious as an infant-of her semi nudity, far more suggestive than would have been entire nakedness-of the white, coral tipped little breast that peered above her fallen gown-of the revelation of tempting bare thighs-of fair and dainty and distracting beau ties between them exposed by an unbuttoned combination.
Well, she was his child, his charge, his little girl. He could disregard his fluttering pulse and hide the glow in his eyes and attend to all her needs, even such a minor, laughable one as this. He wanted her to feel this utter unconsciousness of evil with him-this confidence that she might appeal to him no matter what the circumstances.
Smiling he crossed the room to her. He sat by her upon the rug and attended to the obstinate garter. He denuded the second leg and foot. He lifted her and stripped from her body the pretty gown. Unhesitating he drew upward and off over her sunny head the dainty combination.
For the first time he saw her in entire nakedness. She was, he thought, the loveliest thing he had ever seen. In every part-fine young breasts and slender, charmingly molded torso, exquisite limbs, shoulders, back and buttocks, as well as in the dainty intimacies of her person-she was like a wood nymph.
Now Violet also became for the first time conscious of whatever of suggestiveness the situation held. The fumes of the wine were clearing in a degree from her head-but enough of them remained to make her realize her nudity before her guardian and to rejoice in it.
She felt now the effects of the golden draughts in the form of a sensual thrill over the indecency of the episode. She danced about the room like a frolicking infant.
"Now you can see your little girl-all of her-Guardy, dear old Guardy'." she sang. "If she's naughty you can spank her, but you'll have to catch her first."
Laughing but red of face, the man entered into the spirit of her play. He dashed here and there after her-and grasped her by the side of the bed. He took up the thin night robe which awaited her and tried to slip it over her head. She twisted away from his efforts and made them futile.
Suddenly she leaped at him. She caught him by the neck and hoisted herself with a firm clutch. She cast her thighs about his waist. He caught her by the velvet cheeks of her bottom to prevent her from slipping and falling. She sprinkled kisses over all his countenance. And finally she glued her soft, fervent lips to his in a kiss that made him totter upon his robust legs.
"You must have me-darling, darling Guardy-you must take me-make me really your own little girl. I must-oh, I must lie under you and feel your dear body on mine. Please, beloved man, please!"
She was half sobbing, crazed with the intensity of the sudden flaring of her young passion for this man. And the wall of his temperate resolve toppled and fell in fragments.
He deposited her on the bed, whence, her big eyes upon him and her white naked body quivering, she watched his rapid disrobing. She saw his firm, healthy body emerge into the clear light. She saw the instrument which she had chosen as the high priest of a sacred rite. It stood forth in rigid pink and white fitness for its mission.
Violet had never an instant in the process of her deflowering when she wavered in her passionate yearning to become the physical mate of this man, as she was already his mate in other respects. Pain-when it came, as come it must-drew from her panting lips hardly the softest of tiny moans.
And the pangs were swallowed up immediately in a renewed surge of fiery passion.
The girl-no longer, perhaps, strictly entitled to that appellation-lay on her back in the marble tub half filled with tepid water. She was being laved most carefully by the oddest of attendants-a nude and stalwart man whose eyes beamed with happiness and affection.
She smiled up at him.
"You had me, Guardy. You weren't going to, you mean, stingy thing," she said.
