small, hot room, and both George Cannon's hands were on her unresisting
shoulders; and then they were round her, and she felt his physical
nearness, the texture of his coat and of his skin; she could see in a
mist the separate hairs of his tremendous moustache and the colours
swimming in his eyes; her nostrils expanded in transient alarm to a
faint, exciting masculine odour. She was disconcerted, if not
panic-struck, by the violence of his first kiss; but her consternation
was delectable to her.

And amid her fright and her joy, and the wonder of her extreme surprise,
and the preoccupation of being whirled down the river, she calmly
reflected, somewhere in her brain: "The door is not locked. Supposing
some one were to come in and see us!" And she reflected also, in an
ecstasy of relief: "My life will be quite simple, now. I shall have
nothing to worry about. And I can help him." For during a year past she
had never ceased to ask herself what she must do to arrange her life;
her conscience had never ceased to tell her that she ought not to be
content to remain in the narrow ideas of her mother, and that though she
preferred marriage she ought to act independently of the hope of it.
Throughout her long stay in Preston Street she had continually said:
"After this--what? This cannot last for ever. When it comes to an end
what am I to do to satisfy my conscience?" And she had thought vaguely
of magnificent activities and purposes--she knew not what.... The
problem existed no more. Her life was arranged. And now, far more
sincerely than in the King's Road twenty minutes earlier, she regarded
the career of a spinster with horror and with scorn. At best, she
suddenly perceived with blinding clearness, it would have been
pitiful--pitiful! Twenty minutes earlier, in the King's Road, she had
dreamt of belonging absolutely to some man, of being at his disposal, of
being under his might, of being helpless before him. And now!... Miracle
thrice miraculous! Miracle unconceived, inconceivable!... No more 'talk'
now!...

She told herself how admirable was the man. She assured herself that he
was entirely admirable. She reminded herself that she had always deemed
him admirable, that only twenty minutes earlier, in the King's Road,
when there was in her mind no dimmest, wildest notion of the real
future, she had genuinely admired him. How clever, how tactful, how
indomitable, how conquering, how generous, how kind he was! How kind to
h