g about her in
a fit of dreamy wonder. Her feelings were unlike any she had ever known:
richer, deeper, more complete. For the first time everything in her,
from head to foot, seemed to be feeding the same full current of
sensation.

She took off her hat and went to the dressing-table to smooth her hair.
The pressure of the hat had flattened the dark strands on her forehead;
her face was paler than usual, with shadows about the eyes. She felt a
pang of regret for the wasted years. "If I look like this today," she
said to herself, "what will he think of me when I'm ill or worried?" She
began to run her fingers through her hair, rejoicing in its thickness;
then she desisted and sat still, resting her chin on her hands.

"I want him to see me as I am," she thought.

Deeper than the deepest fibre of her vanity was the triumphant sense
that AS SHE WAS, with her flattened hair, her tired pallor, her thin
sleeves a little tumbled by the weight of her jacket, he would like her
even better, feel her nearer, dearer, more desirable, than in all the
splendours she might put on for him. In the light of this discovery she
studied her face with a new intentness, seeing its defects as she had
never seen them, yet seeing them through a kind of radiance, as though
love were a luminous medium into which she had been bodily plunged.

She was glad now that she had confessed her doubts and her jealousy.
She divined that a man in love may be flattered by such involuntary
betrayals, that there are moments when respect for his liberty appeals
to him less than the inability to respect it: moments so propitious
that a woman's very mistakes and indiscretions may help to establish her
dominion. The sense of power she had been aware of in talking to Darrow
came back with ten-fold force. She felt like testing him by the most
fantastic exactions, and at the same moment she longed to humble herself
before him, to make herself the shadow and echo of his mood. She wanted
to linger with him in a world of fancy and yet to walk at his side in
the world of fact. She wanted him to feel her power and yet to love her
for her ignorance and humility. She felt like a slave, and a goddess,
and a girl in her teens...

XIII

Darrow, late that evening, threw himself into an armchair before his
fire and mused.

The room was propitious to meditation. The red-veiled lamp, the corners
of shadow, the splashes of firelight on the curves of old full-bodied
w