not lasted.
He was left with a feeling of emptiness and disillusionment, as of
having given himself a good mark without reason.

While walking, he was a target for the eyes of many women, who passed him
rapidly, like ships in sail. The special fastidious shyness of his face
attracted those accustomed to another kind of face. And though he did
not precisely look at them, they in turn inspired in him the
compassionate, morbid curiosity which persons who live desperate lives
necessarily inspire in the leisured, speculative mind. One of them
deliberately approached him from a side-street. Though taller and fuller,
with heightened colour, frizzy hair, and a hat with feathers; she was the
image of the little model--the same shape of face, broad cheek-bones,
mouth a little open; the same flower-coloured eyes and short black
lashes, all coarsened and accentuated as Art coarsens and accentuates the
lines of life. Looking boldly into Hilary's startled face, she laughed.
Hilary winced and walked on quickly.

He reached home at half-past ten. The lamp was burning in Mr. Stone's
room, and his window was, as usual, open; that which was not usual,
however, was a light in Hilary's own bedroom. He went gently up.
Through the door-ajar-he saw, to his surprise, the figure of his wife.
She was reclining in a chair, her elbows on its arms, the tips of her
fingers pressed together. Her face, with its dark hair, vivid colouring,
and sharp lines, was touched with shadows, her head turned as though
towards somebody beside her; her neck gleamed white. So--motionless,
dimly seen--she was like a woman sitting alongside her own life,
scrutinising, criticising, watching it live, taking no part in it.
Hilary wondered whether to go in or slip away from his strange visitor.

"Ah! it's you," she said.

Hilary approached her. For all her mocking of her own charms, this wife
of his was strangely graceful. After nineteen years in which to learn
every line of her face and body, every secret of her nature, she still
eluded him; that elusiveness, which had begun by being such a charm, had
got on his nerves, and extinguished the flame it had once lighted. He
had so often tried to see, and never seen, the essence of her soul. Why
was she made like this? Why was she for ever mocking herself, himself,
and every other thing? Why was she so hard to her own life, so bitter a
foe to her own happiness? Leonardo da Vinci might have painted her, less