My Dear ChloΓ©,
Regarding the matter of my lack of self control, I can only offer you my full and unreserved apology. Of course, there can be no excuse for my aberrant behaviour. All I have in my defence would be an explanation of how in my state of tiredness I perhaps misconstrued and misread your signals.
As you knew, it had been my misfortune to have been decorating all day. Such physical toil is quite outside a gentleman's charter and I fear such labour was a shock to the system. It left me quite dizzy with tiredness. It is possible that in this state, my judgement was clouded.
I was so pleased to receive your invitation for supper and I journeyed to your shire with a light heart and raised spirit.
I am, I fear, a slave to beauty. Beauty devastates and lays waste all reason. When I disembarked from the carriage and saw you standing there in the doorway, with my defences already weakened by tiredness, I quite forgot myself. Your charming form had all manner razed and etiquette relinquished. If you were not so beautiful, I would not have been be so wounded. For this, you must see that you struck the first blow. How could I not kiss you?
Dearest ChloΓ©, how many French Francs have changed hands for haute couture that will fall on frame not one thousandth as delightful as yours? But you know this. Only you would wear a fifty Franc scrap of summer, found on a market stall in Paris and knowingly mock and undo Channel, Gaultier and Dior.
Did God and angels conspire in the creation of your form? Did God instruct angels to collect the paths swallows trace in the sky? Did he then throw away all but the most graceful and fashion those left with the sole intention of undoing kind man?
Who called for the setting sun on that terrace, and who asked for it to dance on your cheeks and fall asleep in your lap? Who asked it to fall down your slender arms, roll down your golden thighs and kiss your dainty feet. Did you ask for those highlights of distraction stealing my gaze.
You knew all along as you sat there with your coltish legs playing across my lap, you knew that my mind had slipped its reins and I was unharnessed from reason and you did nothing but sip your wine and stretch and curl against me. It was not really my fault that my fingers had to walk in the path of my sight. Tracing the swallow's path from ankle to thigh. You never asked me to stop, when my hand found itself twisted in your hair, for you had implicitly invited it there.
-o-
Why did you arch and sigh when I pulled your hair tight?
Why did your thighs fall open with no sign of a fight?
Why did your eyes close as if lost in your dreams?
And why did you gush all over my jeans?
-o-
I implore you to consider what we consider as fair.
I think you were at fault as much as me there.
In my arms I bore you to your maiden bed,