anging, lit-up eyes. She
was a strange creature to him. But she had no power over him.
She flushed, and was irritated. Yet she glanced again and again
at his dark, living face, curiously, as if she despised him. She
despised his uncritical, unironical nature, it had nothing for
her. Yet it angered her as if she were jealous. He watched her
with deferential interest as he would watch a stoat playing. But
he himself was not implicated. He was different in kind. She was
all lambent, biting flames, he was a red fire glowing steadily.
She could get nothing out of him. So she made him flush darkly
by assuming a biting, subtle class-superiority. He flushed, but
still he did not object. He was too different.

Her little boy came in with the nurse. He was a quick, slight
child, with fine perceptiveness, and a cool transitoriness in
his interest. At once he treated Will Brangwen as an outsider.
He stayed by Anna for a moment, acknowledged her, then was gone
again, quick, observant, restless, with a glance of interest at
everything.

The father adored him, and spoke to him in Polish. It was
queer, the stiff, aristocratic manner of the father with the
child, the distance in the relationship, the classic fatherhood
on the one hand, the filial subordination on the other. They
played together, in their different degrees very separate, two
different beings, differing as it were in rank rather than in
relationship. And the baroness smiled, smiled, smiled, always
smiled, showing her rather protruding teeth, having always a
mysterious attraction and charm.

Anna realized how different her own life might have been, how
different her own living. Her soul stirred, she became as
another person. Her intimacy with her husband passed away, the
curious enveloping Brangwen intimacy, so warm, so close, so
stifling, when one seemed always to be in contact with the other
person, like a blood-relation, was annulled. She denied it, this
close relationship with her young husband. He and she were not
one. His heat was not always to suffuse her, suffuse her,
through her mind and her individuality, till she was of one heat
with him, till she had not her own self apart. She wanted her
own life. He seemed to lap her and suffuse her with his being,
his hot life, till she did not know whether she were herself, or
whether she were another creature, united with him in a world of
close blood-intimacy that closed over her and excluded her from
all the cool