caught, and Philip sometimes
went down and talked to her. He found out that she had belonged to a
profession whose most notorious member for our generation was Mrs. Warren,
and having made a competence she now lived the quiet life of the
bourgeoise. She told Philip lewd stories.

"You must go to Seville," she said--she spoke a little broken English.
"The most beautiful women in the world."

She leered and nodded her head. Her triple chin, her large belly, shook
with inward laughter.

It grew so hot that it was almost impossible to sleep at night. The heat
seemed to linger under the trees as though it were a material thing. They
did not wish to leave the starlit night, and the three of them would sit
on the terrace of Ruth Chalice's room, silent, hour after hour, too tired
to talk any more, but in voluptuous enjoyment of the stillness. They
listened to the murmur of the river. The church clock struck one and two
and sometimes three before they could drag themselves to bed. Suddenly
Philip became aware that Ruth Chalice and Lawson were lovers. He divined
it in the way the girl looked at the young painter, and in his air of
possession; and as Philip sat with them he felt a kind of effluence
surrounding them, as though the air were heavy with something strange. The
revelation was a shock. He had looked upon Miss Chalice as a very good
fellow and he liked to talk to her, but it had never seemed to him
possible to enter into a closer relationship. One Sunday they had all gone
with a tea-basket into the forest, and when they came to a glade which was
suitably sylvan, Miss Chalice, because it was idyllic, insisted on taking
off her shoes and stockings. It would have been very charming only her
feet were rather large and she had on both a large corn on the third toe.
Philip felt it made her proceeding a little ridiculous. But now he looked
upon her quite differently; there was something softly feminine in her
large eyes and her olive skin; he felt himself a fool not to have seen
that she was attractive. He thought he detected in her a touch of contempt
for him, because he had not had the sense to see that she was there, in
his way, and in Lawson a suspicion of superiority. He was envious of
Lawson, and he was jealous, not of the individual concerned, but of his
love. He wished that he was standing in his shoes and feeling with his
heart. He was troubled, and the fear seized him that love would pass him
by. He wanted a passion