suffering formed by one so young, who had already borne an unhappy
girlhood with a mother who drugged and a stepfather who dared not show
his affection for her for fear of his wife's jealousy. The kind, weak
little man had died and left her a few hundreds a year; she was always
grateful to him for that, and forgave him for not standing between her
and her mother as he might have done. Those hundreds had saved her from
any question of taking money from Killigrew. Her poems would not have
kept her--that she knew. Also she had never done as well as in that first
slim book when she had known nothing of life at all. Real experience had
bitten too deep for transmission to paper.

When he came back from Paris, a year after the time at Cloom, he had
written to her and she had met him. Then it had all come out--all about
her wretched home and her mother--and they had met again and again.
Killigrew could not bear the thought of suffering, and he had tried to
make up to her by taking her out as much as he could--not alone, for
that was impossible in those days, but always with such others as merely
formed a pleasant negative background. Between them from the first of
those days in London was a consciousness of being man and woman there
had not been for her at Cloom, though he now told her she had always
disturbed him, that there was for him a something profoundly troubling
in her slim sexless body, her burning mind, her quaint little sureness
of poise which never let her lose her sense of proportion. That had so
appealed to him ... never from her had he heard the talk of women, that
love was the greatest thing in the world, or that any one person could
matter more than all the many other things put together. She had thought
with him that life was far otherwise--made up of many things, a
pattern.... And yet it was she who, though in theory keeping all those
ideas, had lived and suffered only for the one thing, had her horizon
narrowed to his figure. All the time she told herself it was a distorted
view, but that did not prevent her suffering; it only enabled her to be
aware that it mattered very little whether she suffered or not.

They had gone on meeting, and soon it was a recognised thing that he
should kiss her who had never even let herself so much as be kissed at a
dance. But this was different, she told herself--he kissed her so
kindly. His kisses altered, but still she bore them, dimly aware of
portent in them, but trying,