. He explained his meaning no further.

"But I don't know you or your circumstances," she said at last, as he
remained silent.

"You have no opinion about me one way or the other?"

"Yes, I suppose I have an opinion--" she hesitated.

He controlled his wish to ask her to explain herself, and much to his
pleasure she went on, appearing to search her mind.

"I thought that you criticized me--perhaps disliked me. I thought of you
as a person who judges--"

"No; I'm a person who feels," he said, in a low voice.

"Tell me, then, what has made you do this?" she asked, after a break.

He told her in an orderly way, betokening careful preparation, all that
he had meant to say at first; how he stood with regard to his brothers
and sisters; what his mother had said, and his sister Joan had refrained
from saying; exactly how many pounds stood in his name at the bank; what
prospect his brother had of earning a livelihood in America; how much of
their income went on rent, and other details known to him by heart. She
listened to all this, so that she could have passed an examination in
it by the time Waterloo Bridge was in sight; and yet she was no more
listening to it than she was counting the paving-stones at her feet. She
was feeling happier than she had felt in her life. If Denham could have
seen how visibly books of algebraic symbols, pages all speckled with
dots and dashes and twisted bars, came before her eyes as they trod the
Embankment, his secret joy in her attention might have been dispersed.
She went on, saying, "Yes, I see.... But how would that help you?...
Your brother has passed his examination?" so sensibly, that he had
constantly to keep his brain in check; and all the time she was in fancy
looking up through a telescope at white shadow-cleft disks which were
other worlds, until she felt herself possessed of two bodies, one
walking by the river with Denham, the other concentrated to a silver
globe aloft in the fine blue space above the scum of vapors that was
covering the visible world. She looked at the sky once, and saw that no
star was keen enough to pierce the flight of watery clouds now coursing
rapidly before the west wind. She looked down hurriedly again. There was
no reason, she assured herself, for this feeling of happiness; she was
not free; she was not alone; she was still bound to earth by a million
fibres; every step took her nearer home. Nevertheless, she exulted
as she had never exulted before