in the room. She
was sad that in this new life in England, which had seemed so promising,
one still had to turn for comfort from persons to things. She was aware
that wildness such as this, such preferences for walking abroad in the
chill night rather than sitting in warm rooms, for sterile swift water
rather than the solid earth that bears the crops and supports the
cities, are the processes of poetry working in the soul. But it did not
please her in an older woman. She felt that Mrs. Melville, who would
have been trotting about crying out at the magnificence of the room,
would have been behaving not only more conveniently, but more decently,
than this woman who was now crossing the room and not bringing peace
with her. Her open coat slipped backwards on her shoulders so that it
stood out on each side like a cloak worn by a romantic actor striding
across the stage to the play's climax. The ultimate meaning of her
expression could be no other than insolence, for it gave sign of some
preoccupation so strong that the only force which could hold her back
from speaking of it could be contempt for her hearer. Her face was
shadowed with a suggestion of strong feeling, which was as unsuitable on
cheeks so worn as paint would have been.

Ellen drooped her head so that she need not look at her as she sat down
on the bed beside her with neither word nor gesture that said it was a
movement towards intimacy, and said, "I hope you're not very tired."
When Ellen went into the bathroom she wept in her bath, because the
words could not have been said more indifferently, and it was dreadful
to suspect, as she had to later, that someone so like Richard was either
affected or hypocritical. For if that wildness were sincere, and not
some Southern affectation (and she had always heard that the English
were very affected), then the nice but ordinary things she said when she
was doing up Ellen's black taffeta frock must be all hypocrisy and
condescension.

It was a pity that she was so very like Richard. When they had gone
downstairs and taken a table in that same glittering room behind the
plate glass walls, Ellen forgot her uncomfortable feeling that as she
crossed the room everyone had stared at her feet in a nasty sort of way
in her resentful recognition of that likeness. She was not, of course,
so handsome as Richard, though she was certainly what people call "very
striking-looking." Ellen felt pleased that the description should be at