Four years ago Felix had promised Sheilah he wouldn't smoke. Four years ago, in the Wallbridge high-school, promising a girl you wouldn't smoke for her sake sealed a secret compact between you, when you were both too young and timid to talk of love. Four years ago Sheilah had accepted the position of Felix's good angel. Girls were good angels to boys when Sheilah was in her early teens. To Felix she was still his good angel.
He hadn't seen Sheilah for over two years when he engaged the room on Greene Street, but there hadn't been a day that he hadn't thought of her. Everything he did, like coming to college, everything he didn't do, like not smoking, was for Sheilah. Still for Sheilah! Even though she had hurt him so, too. Even though his common sense told him that he had faded to nothing but a memory to her. Oh, but once she had cared! Once he could keep her by him by just laying his fingers on her wrist. And once—the last time he had seen her—it had not been by her wrist that he had kept her by him, so still and quiet there in the inky blackness of the ice-house.
It hadn't been a kiss, exactly. Less definite than a kiss. No real beginning. No real ending. She had pushed against him a little at first. He liked to recall—the feeling of Sheilah pushing against him a little. And then had become willing. Afterwards she had whispered, close, 'We mustn't. Oh, we mustn't.'
