which his laboriously acquired technique of villainy would
have been wasted, so it had been the problem set his virtuosity to
create a situation which would let him fulfil his body's hunger for her
and at the same time kill for ever all possibility of love between them.
She could imagine him seated under the little window in the butler's
pantry, polishing a silver teapot with paste and his own fingers, as
old-fashioned butlers do, for he was scrupulous in all matters of
craftsmanship; holding his fat face obliquely, so that it seemed as
unrelated to anything but space as a riding moon, save when he looked
down and smiled to see the blue square of the window and the elm top
shine upside down and distorted in the bulbous silver: thinking his
solution out to its perfect issue.

It had been quite perfect. By that visit, and by his abstention from any
later visit, he had induced in her just that mood of serenity and
confidence which would be most shocked by the irruption of his passion.
The evening when it all happened she had been so utterly given up to
happiness. She had taken the most preposterously long time to put
Richard to bed. He had had a restless day, and had been so drowsy when
she went to feed him in the evening that she had put him back in his
cradle in his day clothes, but about half-past eight he had awakened and
called her, and she found him very lively and roguish. She had stripped
him and then could not bear to put his night-clothes on, he looked so
lovely lying naked in her lap. He was not one of those babies who are
pieces of flesh that slowly acquire animation by feeding and sleeping;
from his birth he had seemed to be charged with the whole vitality of a
man. He was minute as a baby of three months is, he was helpless, he had
not yet made the amazing discovery that his hand belonged to him, but
she knew that when she held him she held a strong man. This babyhood was
the playful disguise in which he came into the world in order that they
might get on easy terms with one another and be perfect companions.
Never would he be able to feel tyrannous because of his greater
strength, for he would remember the time when she had lifted him in her
weak arms, and that same memory would prevent her from ever being
depressed into a sense of inferiority, so that they would ever move in
the happy climate of a sense of equality. And every moment of this
journey towards that perfect relationship was going to be a delight.