Lolita

was as simple as a bit of dry wood. She was frankly and hugely pregnant. Her head looked smaller (only two seconds had passed really, but let me give them as much wooden duration as life can stand), and her pale-freckled cheeks were hollowed, and her bare shins and arms had lost all their tan, so that the little hairs showed. She wore a brown, sleeveless cotton dress and sloppy felt slippers.
    “We—e—ell!” she exhaled after a pause with all the emphasis of wonder and welcome.
    “Husband at home?” I croaked, fist in pocket.
    I could not kill
her
, of course, as some have thought. You see, I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
    “Come in,” she said with a vehement cheerful note. Against the splintery deadwood of the door, Dolly Schiller flattened herself as best she could (even rising on tiptoe a little) to let me pass, and was crucified for a moment, looking down, smiling down at the threshold, hollow-cheeked with round
pommettes
, her watered-milk-white arms outspread on the wood. I passed without touching her bulging babe. Dolly-smell, with a faint fried addition. My teeth chattered like an idiot’s. “No, you stay out” (to the dog). She closed the door and followed me and her belly into the dollhouse parlor.
    “Dick’s down there,” she said pointing with an invisible tennis racket, inviting my gaze to travel from the drab parlor-bedroom where we stood, right across the kitchen, and through the back-doorway where, in a rather primitive vista, a dark-haired young stranger in overalls, instantaneously reprieved, was perched with his back to me on a ladder fixing something near or upon the shack of his neighbor, a plumper fellow with only one arm, who stood looking up.
    This pattern she explained from afar, apologetically (“Men will be men”); should she call him in?
    No.
    Standing in the middle of the slanting room and emitting questioning “hm’s,” she made familiar Javanese gestures with her wrists and hands, offering me, in a brief display of humorous courtesy, to choose between a rocker and the divan (their bed after ten P.M .). I say “familiar” because one day she had welcomed me with the same wrist dance to her party in Beardsley. We both sat down on the divan. Curious: although actually her looks had faded, I definitely realized, so hopelessly late in the day, how much she looked—had always looked—like Botticelli’s russet Venus—the same soft nose, the same blurred beauty. In my pocket my fingers gently let go and repacked a little at the tip, within the handkerchief it was nested in, my unused weapon.
    “That’s not the fellow I want,” I said.
    The diffuse look of welcome left her eyes. Her forehead puckered as in the old bitter days:
    “Not
who?”
    “Where is he? Quick!”
    “Look,” she said, inclining her head to one side and shaking it in that position. “Look, you are not going to bring that up.”
    “I certainly am,” I said, and for a moment—strangely enough the only merciful, endurable one in the whole interview—we were bristling at each other as if she were still mine.
    A wise girl, she controlled herself.
    Dick did not know a thing of the whole mess. He thought I was her father. He thought she had run away from an upper-class home just to wash dishes in a diner. He believed anything. Why should I want to make things harder than they were by raking up all that muck?
    But, I said, she must be sensible, she must be a sensible girl (with her bare drum under that thin brown stuff), she must understand that if she expected the help I had come to give, I must have at least a clear comprehension of the situation.
    “Come, his name!”
    She thought I had guessed long ago. It was (with a mischievous and melancholy smile) such a sensational name. I would never believe it. She could hardly believe it herself.
    His name, my fall nymph.
    It was so unimportant, she said. She suggested I skip it. Would I like a cigarette?
    No. His name.
    She shook her head with great resolution. She guessed it was too late to raise hell and I would never believe the unbelievably unbelievable—
    I said I had better go, regards, nice to have seen her.
    She said really it was useless, she would never tell, but on the other hand, after all—“Do you really want to know who it was? Well, it was—”
    And softly, confidentially, arching her thin eyebrows and puckering her parched lips, she emitted, a little mockingly, somewhat