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While they sat so, each engrossed in private thoughts, the sun went down and it grew dark.

And he thought: Seeing that she is still sitting with me, though the sun is gone and it has become dark, it may be that she wouldn’t so much object to my kissing her.

Then he laid his arm softly around her neck.

She had not expected this at all. She had imagined he would merely kiss her and nothing more, and with that she would give him a box on the ear and go off like a princess. Now she didn’t know what she should do; she wanted of course to be angry with him, but at the same time she didn’t want to lose the kiss. She therefore sat quite still.

Thereupon he kissed her.

It felt much more strange than she had supposed. She felt that she was growing pale and faint, she entirely forgot that she was to give him a box on the ear and that he was only a student reading for his examination.

But he thought of a passage in a book by a religious physician on “The Sex Life of Woman,” which read: “One must guard against letting the marital embrace come under the dominion of sensuality.” And he thought that this must be very difficult to guard against, if even a kiss could do so much.