ut sugar-cakes?
When another waiter came and Marion murmured tentatively, "Wine?" she
answered with passionate assumption of self-possession, "Yes, please."
She almost wavered when Marion, not raising her eyes, asked, "Red or
white?" It brought her back to that night in the office when Mr. Philip
had made her drink that Burgundy and then had come towards her, looking
almost hump-back with strangeness, while all the shadows in the corners
had seemed to leap a little and then stand still in expectation. Fear
travelled through all her veins, weakening the blood; she pressed her
lips together and braced her shoulders, living the occasion over again
till all the evil things dissolved at Richard's knock upon the door.
Because of him, how immune from fear she had become! She lifted her eyes
to Marion and said confidently, "Red, please."

The blankness of the gaze that met her had, she felt sure, been
substituted but the second before for a gaze richly complicated with
observation and speculation. She scowled and remembered that she was
disliking this woman on the highest grounds, and as she ate she sent her
eyes round the restaurant, knowing quite well the line of the thought
she expected it to arouse in her. She was not, in fact, seeing things
with any acuteness. There was a woman at a table close by wearing a
dress of a very beautiful blue, the colour of the lower flowers of the
darkest delphiniums, but the sight of it gave her none of the pleasant
physical sensations, the pricking of the skin, the desire to rub the
palms of the hands together quickly that she usually experienced when
she saw an intense, clear colour. But she saw, though all the images
seemed to refuse to travel from her eyes to the nerves, many people in
bright clothes, the women showing their arms and shoulders as she had
always heard rich women do, the men with glossy faces which reminded her
in their brilliance and their blankness of the nails on Marion's hands;
pretty food, like the things to eat in Keat's St. Agnes' Eve, being
carried about on gleaming dishes by waiters whose bodies seemed
deformed with obsequiousness; jewel-coloured wines hanging suspended
over the white cloths in glasses invisible save where they glittered;
bottles with gold necks lolling in pails among lumps of ice like tipsy
gnomes overcome by sleep on some Alpine pass; innumerable fairy frocks
and vessels of alabaster patterned like a cloud invested strong lights
with the colour o