hoice. For he found himself saying huskily, "I
didn't mean to be rude. I had forgotten you were Scotch. You're a person
all by yourself. One doesn't think of you as belonging to any country."

"Well, of course," she murmured, "father was Irish; but he was just an
expense."

He choked back a laugh. But this sense that she was funny did not blur
the romantic quality of his love for her any more than this last
manifestation of her funniness spoiled the clear beauty of her face,
which now, in this moonlight that painted black shadows under her high
cheek-bones, was candid and alert like the face of a narcissus. "I
didn't mean to be rude," he repeated. "I didn't think that what I said
could possibly touch you. As if I could say anything about you that
wasn't...." His voice cracked like a boy's. He felt an agony of
tenderness towards her, and a terrifying sense that love was not all
delight. It was stripping him of the armour of hardness and
self-possession that it had been the business of his adult years to
acquire, and it was leaving him the raw and smarting substance,
accessible and attractive to pain, that he had not been since he was a
boy.

And it was all to no purpose. For nothing seemed more likely than that
Ellen should look up at him fixedly and fully assume that expression of
wisdom which sometimes intruded into the youth in her eyes; that she
should say in a new deep voice, "You are not good enough for me." And of
course it would be true, it would be true. Then she would walk on and
turn the corner to her home, and he would be left alone among these
desolate tall houses, eternally hungry. He could imagine how she would
look as she turned the corner, the forward slant of her body, the upward
tilt of her head, the awful irrevocable quality of her movements, the
ghostlike glamour the moonlight would lay on her as if to warn him that
she was as separate from him as though she were dead. He would not be
able to pursue her, for there was something about her which would
prevent him from ever trying on her those ordinary compulsions which men
are accustomed to apply to women; quiet, menacing devotion, or
persistent roaring importunities, or those forcible embraces, of which
he thought with the disgust he now felt for the sexual processes of
everybody in the world except himself and Ellen, which induce the body
to betray the reluctant mind. Because he loved her he was obliged, in
spite of himself, to acknowledge the sac