you like." George spoke with a careless smile.

Now, facing her, he put his hands on her damp shoulders. She looked up
at him over the towel, leaning her head forward, and suspending action.
Her nose was about a foot from his. She saw, as she had seen a hundred
times, every detail of his large, handsome and yet time-worn face, every
hair of his impressive moustache, all the melting shades of colour in
his dark eyes. His charm was coarse and crude, but he was very skilful,
and there was something about his experienced, weather-beaten, slightly
depraved air, which excited her. She liked to feel young and girlish
before him; she liked to feel that with him, alone of all men, her
modesty availed nothing. She was beginning to realize her power over
him, and the extent of it. It was a power miraculous and mysterious,
never claimed by her, and never admitted by him save in glance and
gesture. This power lay in the fact that she was indispensable to him.
He was not her slave--she might indeed have been considered the human
chattel--but he was the slave of his need of her. He loved her. In him
she saw what love was; she had seen it more and more clearly ever since
the day of their engagement. She was both proud and ashamed of her
power. He did not possess a similar power over herself. She was fond of
him, perhaps getting fonder; but his domination of her senses was
already nearly at an end. She had passed through painful, shattering
ecstasies of bliss, hours unforgettable, hours which she knew could
never recur. And she was left sated and unsatisfied. So that by virtue
of this not yet quite bitter disillusion, she was coming to regard
herself as his superior, as being less naive than he, as being even
essentially older than he. And in speaking to him sometimes she would
put on a grave and precociously sapient mien, as if to indicate that she
had access to sources of wisdom for ever closed to him.

"But don't you think we _ought_ to write?" she frowned.

"Certainly if you like! It won't do any good. You don't suppose her aunt
will come down here, do you? And even if she did.... There it is, and
there you are!"

"Just let me wipe my shoulders, will you?" she said.

He lifted his hands obediently, and as they were damp he rubbed them on
the loose corner of the towel.

"Well," he said, "I must be off, I reckon."

"Shall you see Mr. Boutwood?"

"I might.... I know where to catch him, I fancy."

She seemed to have a glimpse