e had
altered, and her gestures. She would ask herself, could it be true
that she was a married woman? But her glance and gestures announced
it true at every instant. A new languor and a new confidence had
transformed the girl. Her body had been modified and her soul at
once chastened and fired. Fresh in her memory was endless matter for
meditation. And on the sofa, in a negligent attitude of repose,
with shameless eyes gazing far into the caverns of the fire, and an
unreadable faint smile on her face, she meditated. And she was the
most seductive, tantalizing, self-contradictory object for study in
the whole of Bursley. She had never been so interesting as in this
brief period, and she might never be so interesting again.

Mrs. Tams entered. With her voice Mrs. Tams said, "Shall I begin to
clear all these things away, _mam_?" But with her self-conscious
eyes Mrs. Tams said to the self-conscious eyes of Rachel, "What a
staggering world we live in, don't we?"

II

Rachel sprang from the Chesterfield, smoothed down her frock, shook
her hair, and then ran upstairs to the large front bedroom, where
Louis, to whom the house was just as much a toy as to Rachel, was
about to knock a nail into a wall. Out of breath, she stood close
to him very happily. The At Home was over. She was now definitely
received as a married woman in a town full of married women and girls
waiting to be married women. She had passed successfully through a
trying and exhausting experience; the nervous tension was slackened.
And therefore it might be expected that she would have a sense of
reaction, the vague melancholy which is produced when that which has
long been seen before is suddenly seen behind. But it was not so
in the smallest degree. Every moment of her existence equally was
thrilling and happy. One piquant joy was succeeded immediately by
another as piquant. To Rachel it was not in essence more exciting to
officiate at an At Home than to watch Louis drive a nail into a wall.

The man winked at her in the dusk; she winked back, and put her hand
intimately on his shoulder. She thought, "I am safe with him now in
the house." The feeling of solitude with him, of being barricaded
against the world and at the mercy of Louis alone, was exquisite to
her. Then Louis raised himself on his toes, and raised his left arm
with the nail as high as he could, and stuck the point of the nail
against a pencil-mark on the wall. Then he raised the right