liceman. What a shame," she burst
out passionately, "that they have to drink to forget their trouble!"
She made no remark upon the strangeness of starving workmen being able
to pay for beer sufficient to intoxicate themselves. Nor did she
comment, as a woman, on the misery of the wives and children at home in
the slums and the cheap cottage-rows. She merely compassionated the men
in that they were driven to brutishness. Her features showed painful
pity masking disgust.

She stepped back into the shop.

"Do you know," she began, in a new tone, "you've quite altered my notion
of poetry--what you said as we were going up to the station."

"Really!" He smiled nervously. He was very pleased. He would have
been astounded by this speech from her, a professed devotee of poetry,
if in those instants the capacity for astonishment had remained to him.

"Yes," she said, and continued, frowning and picking at her muff: "But
you do alter my notions, I don't know how it is... So this is your
little office!"

The door of the cubicle was open.

"Yes, go in and have a look at it."

"Shall I?" She went in.

He followed her.

And no sooner was she in than she muttered, "I must hurry off now." Yet
a moment before she seemed to have infinite leisure.

"Shall you be at Brighton long?" he demanded, and scarcely recognised
his own accents.

"Oh! I can't tell! I've no idea. It depends."

"How soon shall you be down our way again?"

She only shook her head.

"I say--you know--" he protested.

"Good-bye," she said, quavering. "Thanks very much." She held out her
hand.

"But--" He took her hand.

His suffering was intolerable. It was torture of the most exquisite
kind. Her hand pressed his. Something snapped in him. His left hand
hovered shaking over her shoulder, and then touched her shoulder, and he
could feel her left hand on his arm. The embrace was clumsy in its
instinctive and unskilled violence, but its clumsiness was redeemed by
all his sincerity and all hers. His eyes were within six inches of her
eyes, full of delicious shame, anxiety, and surrender. They kissed...
He had amorously kissed a woman. All his past life sank away, and he
began a new life on the impetus of that supreme and final emotion. It
was an emotion that in its freshness, agitating and divine, could never
be renewed. He had felt the virgin answer of her lips on his. She had
told him everything, she had yielded up her myster