DESSALINES' HOUR
skin the long muscles rippled and slid, the one above the other, in a manner which suggested the undulations of a snake beneath the sheeny surface of a pool. He had thrown his cap into the bottom of the canoe and his kinky hair glistened in the sunshine, the rays of which beat so powerlessly upon the dome of the thick African skull.
Virginia was silent for a moment, fluttered; the potentiality of the man's great physique burst upon her afresh and with an unmitigated impulse. At each occasion upon which this physical predominance had forced itself upon her, it had done so with a sense of shock; many things in nature had affected her in a somewhat similar way: swift motion, as in a motor car, a lavish sunset, a bullfight which she had once witnessed in Madrid, but none of these approached the impulse emanating from Dessalines.
Suddenly she realized that he was a man—a living, breathing man, thinking as other men think, more primitive perhaps—and at the thought of the sentient liveness of this great machine she forget Leyden and his theories and their demonstration … lost sight of her own superior mentality, and was filled suddenly with a wild sense of panic; became a timorous woman, cornered, trapped, casting about wild eyed for some avenue of escape.
In a half dozen long, powerful strokes which sent the eddies sucking and swirling for yards in their wake, Dessalines drove the canoe far into the middle of the stream. He looked up at Virginia, crouching in the bow, facing him; virile, primitive creature that he was, he received the impulses emanating from her as a lion
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