mn for any rule." Their lips met again. She had
to dissemble a faint surprise that at this moment he should think about
anything so trivial as the rule that a man should not come into a
woman's bedroom. "Ellen, it was beastly. Really, I don't get any more
fun out of it than you did. I lost my soul. I didn't feel anything for
you that I've ever felt. I simply felt a sort of generalised emotion ...
that any man might have felt for any woman.... It wasn't us...." The
corners of his mouth were drawn down by self-disgust. "Perhaps I am like
my father," he said loathingly. "He was a vile man." Again he forgot
her, and again she laid her hand on his lips. When his thoughts came
back to her he looked happier, though he had to think of her penitently.
"I was a beast," he went on, "the coldest, cruellest beast. Do you know
why I raged at you when you mentioned that little snipe you call Mr.
Philip? I knew it was the roughest luck on you to have gone through that
time with him. But I wasn't sorry for you. I was jealous. I felt you
might have protected yourself from being looked at by any other man in
the world except me, though I knew perfectly you had to earn your
living, and I ought to make it my business to see that you're specially
happy to make up for those months you spent up in that office with those
lustful old swine."

She checked him. He was speaking out of that special knowledge which she
had not got and for lack of which she felt inferior and hoodwinked, and
what he said to her suggested to her that a part of her life which she
had thought she had perfectly understood was a mystery from which she
was debarred by ignorance. "What do you mean?" she cried deridingly, as
if there were no such knowledge. "Why do you call them lustful?"

In his excitement he spoke on. "Of course they both wanted you. I could
see that little snipe Philip did. And everything you told me about them
proves it. And the old man liked to think how he would have wanted you
if he'd been young."

Ellen repeated wistfully, "They wanted me." She did not know what it
meant, but accepted it.

A sudden hush fell on his vehemence. He turned away from her again, and
began to pick at the hem of the counterpane. "Don't you know what that
means?"

She shook her head.

"Oh, Lord!" he said. "I wasn't sure. How frightened you must be."

In the thinnest thread of sound, she murmured: "Sometimes. A little."

He was trembling. "You poor thing. You poor littl