together the whole evening.

"I'm so thankful that I waited for you," he said to her. "I knew that in
the end I must meet you."

People in the ball-room stared. They did not care. They did not wish to
hide their passion. At last they went into the garden. He flung a light
cloak over her shoulders and put her in a waiting cab. They caught the
midnight train to Paris; and they sped through the silent, star-lit night
into the unknown.

He thought of this old fancy of his, and it seemed impossible that he
should be in love with Mildred Rogers. Her name was grotesque. He did not
think her pretty; he hated the thinness of her, only that evening he had
noticed how the bones of her chest stood out in evening-dress; he went
over her features one by one; he did not like her mouth, and the
unhealthiness of her colour vaguely repelled him. She was common. Her
phrases, so bald and few, constantly repeated, showed the emptiness of her
mind; he recalled her vulgar little laugh at the jokes of the musical
comedy; and he remembered the little finger carefully extended when she
held her glass to her mouth; her manners like her conversation, were
odiously genteel. He remembered her insolence; sometimes he had felt
inclined to box her ears; and suddenly, he knew not why, perhaps it was
the thought of hitting her or the recollection of her tiny, beautiful
ears, he was seized by an uprush of emotion. He yearned for her. He
thought of taking her in his arms, the thin, fragile body, and kissing her
pale mouth: he wanted to pass his fingers down the slightly greenish
cheeks. He wanted her.

He had thought of love as a rapture which seized one so that all the world
seemed spring-like, he had looked forward to an ecstatic happiness; but
this was not happiness; it was a hunger of the soul, it was a painful
yearning, it was a bitter anguish, he had never known before. He tried to
think when it had first come to him. He did not know. He only remembered
that each time he had gone into the shop, after the first two or three
times, it had been with a little feeling in the heart that was pain; and
he remembered that when she spoke to him he felt curiously breathless.
When she left him it was wretchedness, and when she came to him again it
was despair.

He stretched himself in his bed as a dog stretches himself. He wondered
how he was going to endure that ceaseless aching of his soul.

LVIII

Philip woke early next morning, and his first th