Page 115 of A Winter By the Sea
With a sigh, she reached into the drawer of her side table and once again pulled out the notebook she kept for inspiration, the one filled with excerpts of literary kisses she had read about in books. She flipped through the pages, stopping at some Byron excerpts.
Did Byron have the right of it? She skimmed through the lines she had copied down.
When heart, and soul, and sense, in concert move,
And the blood’s lava, and the pulse a blaze,
Each kiss a heart-quake...
As if their souls and lips each other beckoned,
Which, being joined, like swarming bees they clung...
“Goodness,” Emily breathed aloud, both intrigued and ill at ease at the thought.
Yet Byron should know what he was talking about. He was reckoned one of greatest Romantic poets in English literature. Then again, he’d had many notorious affairs that had shocked society.
She turned next to a few lines by the Scottish poet Robert Burns. Perhaps he had the right of it when he wrote in dreamy fashion:
Honeyed seal of soft affections,
Tenderest pledge of future bliss
Dearest tie of young connections.
Love’s first snowdrop, virgin bliss.
That sounded sweeter. Purer.
Such extremes.
Emily moaned in exasperation. Perhaps she ought to ask Viola, her one and only married sister, what kissing was really like.
“Lips joinedlike swarming bees?” Viola’s eyebrows rose. “That sounds painful and potentially dangerous.”
Emily’s twin sister regarded her from an armchair near the crackling fire in Westmount’s sitting room, her mouth quirked and eyes glimmering with mirth. “I think someone has been reading too much Byron again.”
“Don’t tease me. I want to know.”
Viola set down her teacup. “He is right about one thing—it is beyond the physical. The heart, and soul, and senses are all involved when you kiss the man you love. Although I have nothing to compare it to, as the only man I’ve kissed is my husband, which is perhaps as it should be.”
Emily sighed. “Then chances are I shall never know what it’s like!”
“Oh, Em. Don’t say that. You will marry one day. I am sure of it.”
“That makes one of us. And in the meantime, how amI supposed to write a novel that convincingly portrays two people falling in love and kissing if I’ve never experienced it myself?”
“You have a good imagination.”
“At least tell me which poet was correct. Is kissing more ‘tender pledge’ or blazing ‘heart-quake’?”
“Both, at different times. Sometimes it’s a tender expression of affection, of our pledge to love and honor each other. And other times there is blazing passion and beating hearts. But please don’t ask me for details or I shall die of embarrassment!”
“We can’t have that,” Emily wryly replied. “I would miss you too much, and the major might miss you just a little as well.”
Her sister chuckled, then said, “I admit that we did not wait to kiss until we married. We kissed once or twice before he proposed, andseveraltimes after.” Viola attempted unsuccessfully to restrain a girlish grin. “But he is the only man I have ever loved or wished to kiss.”
“I am so happy for you, Vi.”
