midnight
Civilisation and her mysterious daughter whom we call nowadays Culture have tried to teach us that golf and lawn tennis and , for the lustiest , fencing , or the control of a spirited horse , must best translate in your house-broken citizen of forty the heat that surged up in Roger then ; but to most of us it becomes once or twice apparent in our sidewalk career , our delicate journey from mahogany sideboards to mahogany beds , that this teaching is idiotic to the last degree , however strictly the police have enforced it ; and we know that only the man that forged with clenched teeth after Atalanta , tenderly hungry for all her uncaptured whiteness , brutally driving the pace till her heart burst in her side if need be , tasted the supremest ecstasy of the fighting that lifts us that one tantalising step above the savage -- the fight for joy . I am convinced that it is after some one of those red glimpses that a certain proportion of us every year of the world 's life throws his chest weights out of window , settles his tailor 's bill , and is off for Africa or Greenland with a hatchet and a cartridge belt . We become thus inscrutable to our maiden aunts and it may be to ourselves , a little , when we discover that it was not quite exactly the struggle for food and shelter , the fight against the cliffs and elements and animals that we went out into the wilderness to seek . But we are in any event less unreasonable than those belated and blindfolded ones among us who translate the implacable desire too literally and lose its meaning utterly in the garbled text of the midnight city streets . Roger literally fell upon this vixenish , beautiful creature with the perfectly definite intention of shaking her until her teeth chattered in her head , but he did not achieve this result , for the reason that Margarita fought like a demon ; fought , her hands being pinioned , with her supple back , her strong shoulders and her rigid knees . It was like struggling with a malicious little girl of six and a stubborn boy of sixteen rolled into one . She did not cry nor chatter but set her teeth and directed all her superb energy to the actual business in hand .