ng the delicate 'rat-tat' of
her husband's knock, did not answer, indifferent whether he came in or
no. He entered noiselessly. If she did not let him know she was awake,
he would not wake her. She lay still and watched him sit down astride of
a chair, cross his arms on its back, rest his chin on them, and fix his
eyes on her. Through her veil of eyelashes she had unconsciously
contrived that his face should be the one object plainly seen--the more
intensely visualized, because of this queer isolation. She did not feel
at all ashamed of this mutual fixed scrutiny, in which she had such
advantage. He had never shown her what was in him, never revealed what
lay behind those bright satiric eyes. Now, perhaps, she would see! And
she lay, regarding him with the intense excited absorption with which one
looks at a tiny wildflower through a magnifying-lens, and watches its
insignificance expanded to the size and importance of a hothouse bloom.
In her mind was this thought: He is looking at me with his real self,
since he has no reason for armour against me now. At first his eyes
seemed masked with their customary brightness, his whole face with its
usual decorous formality; then gradually he became so changed that she
hardly knew him. That decorousness, that brightness, melted off what lay
behind, as frosty dew melts off grass. And her very soul contracted
within her, as if she had become identified with what he was seeing--a
something to be passed over, a very nothing. Yes, his was the face of
one looking at what was unintelligible, and therefore negligible; at that
which had no soul; at something of a different and inferior species and
of no great interest to a man. His face was like a soundless avowal of
some conclusion, so fixed and intimate that it must surely emanate from
the very core of him--be instinctive, unchangeable. This was the real
he! A man despising women! Her first thought was: And he's
married--what a fate! Her second: If he feels that, perhaps thousands of
men do! Am I and all women really what they think us? The conviction in
his stare--its through-and-through conviction--had infected her; and she
gave in to it for the moment, crushed. Then her spirit revolted with
such turbulence, and the blood so throbbed in her, that she could hardly
lie still. How dare he think her like that--a nothing, a bundle of
soulless inexplicable whims and moods and sensuality? A thousand times,
No! It was H