iled by Esther. That was the
trouble. Circe's isle was there, and she was glad they knew it. Jeffrey
did not go so far as to think she wanted inevitably to turn them into
beasts, but he knew she was virtually telling them she had the power.
That had been one of the first horrors of his disenchantment, when she
had placed herself far enough away from him by neither writing to him
nor visiting him; then he had seen her outside the glamour of her
presence. Once he had been proud when the eyes of all men followed her.
That was in the day of his lust for power and life, when her empery
seemed equal in degree to his. Something brutal used to come up in him
when men looked boldly at her, and while he wanted to quench the assault
of their hot eyes it was always with the equal brutality: "She's mine."
That was while he thought she walked unconscious of the insult. But when
he knew she called it tribute, a rage more just than jealousy came up
in him, and he hated something in her as he hated the men desiring her.

Yet now the thought of her was his refuge. She was not his, but he was
hers to the end of earthly time. There was no task for him to do but
somehow to shield Lydia from the welling of her wonderful devotion to
him. If Esther was Circe on her island, Lydia was the nymph in a clear
mountain brook of some undiscovered wood where the birds came to bathe,
but no hoof had ever muddied the streams. If she had, out of her
hero-worship, conceived a passion for him, he had an equal passion for
her, of protectingness and sad certainty that he could do no better than
ensure her distance from him.

XXIII

Jeffrey, in his working clothes, went down to Mill Street and found
Andrea presiding over a shop exhaling the odour of pineapple and
entrancing to the eye, with its piled ovals and spheres of red and
yellow, its diversities of hue and surface. It was a fruit shop, and God
had made the fruit beautiful and Andrea had disposed it so. His wife,
too, was there, a round, dark creature in a plaid skirt and a shirt
waist with islands of lace over a full bosom, her black hair braided and
put round and round her head, and a saving touch of long earrings to
tell you she was still all peasant underneath. A soft round-faced boy
was in charge, and ran out to tell Jeffrey prices. But they all knew
him. Jeffrey felt the puzzle begin all over when Andrea came hurrying
out, like a genial host at an inn, hands outstretched, and his wife
fo