He moved closer and closer, sensing with his nape that the door had shut by itself, closer to the lithe concavity of her spine, to the gathers at her waist, to the lozenge shaped checks of the cloth whose texture he could already palpate from seven feet away, to the firm, light-blue veins above the edge of her knee-high stockings, to the whiteness of her neck sheeny from the sidewise light next to her brown curls.

[33]