g through all this
interview to the inner spirit of her, and was she not willing now to let
it cry out and say to him, "I am here "? Esther was willing to cry out.
In the bewilderment of it, he did not know whether it was superb of her,
though he would have felt it in another woman to be shameless. The
lustrous lights of her eyes dwelt upon him, unwavering. Then her lips
confirmed them.

"Well," said Esther, "isn't it worth it?"

Alston got up and rather blindly went out of the room. In the street,
after the summer breeze had been touching his forehead and yet not
cooling it, he realised he was carrying his hat in his hand, and put it
on hastily. He was Addington to the backbone, when he was not roaming
the fields of fiction, and one of the rules of Addington was against
looking queer. He walked to his office and let himself in. The windows
were closed and the room had the crude odour of public life: dust, stale
tobacco and books. He threw up the windows and hesitated an instant by
the gas jet. It was his habit, when the outer world pressed him too
heavily, to plunge instantly into a book. But books were no anodyne for
the turmoil of this night. Nor was the light upon these familiar
furnishings. He sat down by the window, laid his arms on the sill and
looked out over the meadows, unseen now but throwing their damp
exhalations up to him through the dark. His heart beat hard, and in the
physical vigour of its revolt he felt a fierce pleasure; but he was
shamed all through in some way he felt he could not meet. Had he seen a
new Esther to-night, an Esther that had not seemed to exist under the
soft lashes of the woman he thought he knew so well? He had a stiffly
drawn picture of what a woman ought to be. She really conformed to
Addington ideals. He believed firmly that the austere and noble dwelt
within woman as Addington had framed her. It would have given him no
pleasure to find a savage hidden under pretty wiles. But Alston believed
so sincerely in the control of man over the forces of life, of which
woman was one, that, if Esther had stepped backward from her bright
estate into a barbarous challenge, it was his fault, he owned, not hers.
He should have guided her so that she stayed within hallowed precincts.
He should have upheld her so that she did not stumble over these
pitfalls of the earth. It is a pity those ideals of old Addington that
made Alston Choate believe in women as little lower than the angels
and, if