Lolita

in a slightly foolish but wonderfully endearing smile.
    She was thinner and taller, and for a second it seemed to me her face was less pretty than the mental imprint I had cherished for more than a month: her cheeks looked hollowed and too much lentigo camouflaged her rosy rustic features; and that first impression (a very narrow human interval between two tiger heartbeats) carried the clear implication that all widower Humbert had to do, wanted to do, or would do, was to give this wan-looking though sun-colored little orphan
aux yeux battus
(and even those plumbaceous umbrae under her eyes bore freckles) a sound education, a healthy and happy girlhood, a clean home, nice girl-friends of her age among whom (if the fates deigned to repay me) I might find, perhaps, a pretty little
M
ä
gdlein
for Herr Doktor Humbert alone. But “in a wink,” as the Germans say, the angelic line of conduct was erased, and I overtook my prèy (time moves ahead of our fancies!), and she was my Lolita again—in fact, more of my Lolita than ever. I let my hand rest on her warm auburn head and took up her bag. She was all rose and honey, dressed in her brightest gingham, with a pattern of little red apples, and her arms and legs were of a deep golden brown, with scratches like tiny dotted lines of coagulated rubies, and the ribbed cuffs of her white socks were turned down at the remembered level, and because of her childish gait, or because I had memorized her as always wearing heelless shoes, her saddle oxfords looked somehow too large and too high-heeled for her. Good-bye, Camp Q, merry Camp Q. Good-bye, plain unwholesome food, good-bye Charlie boy. In the hot car she settled down beside me, slapped a prompt fly on her lovely knee; then, her mouth working violently on a piece of chewing gum, she rapidly cranked down the window on her side and settled back again. We sped through the striped and speckled forest.
    “How’s Mother?” she asked dutifully.
    I said the doctors did not quite know yet what the trouble was. Anyway, something abdominal. Abominable? No, abdominal. We would have to hang around for a while. The hospital was in the country, near the gay town of Lepingville, where a great poet had resided in the early nineteenth century and where we would take in all the shows. She thought it a peachy idea and wondered if we could make Lepingville before nine P.M.
    “We should be at Briceland by dinner time,” I said, “and tomorrow we’ll visit Lepingville. How was the hike? Did you have a marvelous time at the camp?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Sorry to leave?”
    “Un-un.”
    “Talk, Lo—don’t grunt. Tell me something.”
    “What thing, Dad?” (she let the word expand with ironic deliberation).
    “Any old thing.”
    “Okay, if I call you that?” (eyes slit at the road).
    “Quite.”
    “It’s a sketch, you know. When did you fall for my mummy?”
    “Some day, Lo, you will understand many emotions and situations, such as for example the harmony, the beauty of spiritual relationship.”
    “Bah!” said the cynical nymphet.
    Shallow lull in the dialogue, filled with some landscape.
    “Look, Lo, at all those cows on that hillside.”
    “I think I’ll vomit if I look at a cow again.”
    “You know, I missed you terribly, Lo.”
    “
I
did not. Fact I’ve been revoltingly unfaithful to you, but it does not matter one bit, because you’ve stopped caring for me, anyway. You drive much faster than my mummy, mister.”
    I slowed down from a blind seventy to a purblind fifty.
    “Why do you think I have ceased caring for you, Lo?”
    “Well, you haven’t kissed me yet, have you?”
    Inly dying, inly moaning, I glimpsed a reasonably wide shoulder of road ahead, and bumped and wobbled into the weeds. Remember she is only a child, remember she is only—
    Hardly had the car come to a standstill than Lolita positively flowed into my arms. Not daring, not daring let myself go—not even daring let myself realize that
this
(sweet wetness and trembling fire) was the beginning of the ineffable life which, ably assisted by fate, I had finally willed into being—not daring really kiss her, I touched her hot, opening lips with the utmost piety, tiny sips, nothing salacious; but she, with an impatient wriggle, pressed her mouth to mine so hard that I felt her big front teeth and shared in the peppermint taste of her saliva. I knew, of course, it was but an innocent game on her part, a bit of backfisch foolery in imitation of some