you" aloud. The presence of this
immense and enduring beauty made her almost alarmingly conscious of her
desire, and at the same time proud of a feeling which did not display
anything like the same proportions when she was going about her daily
work.

She repressed her impulse to speak aloud, and rose and wandered about
rather aimlessly among the statues until she found herself in another
gallery devoted to engraved obelisks and winged Assyrian bulls, and her
emotion took another turn. She began to picture herself traveling with
Ralph in a land where these monsters were couchant in the sand. "For,"
she thought to herself, as she gazed fixedly at some information printed
behind a piece of glass, "the wonderful thing about you is that you're
ready for anything; you're not in the least conventional, like most
clever men."

And she conjured up a scene of herself on a camel's back, in the desert,
while Ralph commanded a whole tribe of natives.

"That is what you can do," she went on, moving on to the next statue.
"You always make people do what you want."

A glow spread over her spirit, and filled her eyes with brightness.
Nevertheless, before she left the Museum she was very far from saying,
even in the privacy of her own mind, "I am in love with you," and that
sentence might very well never have framed itself. She was, indeed,
rather annoyed with herself for having allowed such an ill-considered
breach of her reserve, weakening her powers of resistance, she felt,
should this impulse return again. For, as she walked along the street to
her office, the force of all her customary objections to being in love
with any one overcame her. She did not want to marry at all. It seemed
to her that there was something amateurish in bringing love into touch
with a perfectly straightforward friendship, such as hers was with
Ralph, which, for two years now, had based itself upon common interests
in impersonal topics, such as the housing of the poor, or the taxation
of land values.

But the afternoon spirit differed intrinsically from the morning spirit.
Mary found herself watching the flight of a bird, or making drawings of
the branches of the plane-trees upon her blotting-paper. People came in
to see Mr. Clacton on business, and a seductive smell of cigarette smoke
issued from his room. Mrs. Seal wandered about with newspaper cuttings,
which seemed to her either "quite splendid" or "really too bad for
words." She used to paste thes