a woman who could
do a thing like that. I'll never, never think of him again--I wonder if
he knew I was like that."

The pain that she had been trying to keep out had bitten its way
through, it gnawed at her heart for days and made it tender, and in
growing tender she grew susceptible to pain. She was aware of the world
again; she knew the passion that the world absorbs from things that
feel, and the soul that passes perpetually into its substance. It hurt
her to see the beauty that came upon the Gardens in September evenings,
to see the green earth alive under its web of silver air, and the trees
as they stood enchanted in sunset and blue mist.

There had been a procession of such evenings, alike in that
insupportable beauty and tenderness. On the last of these, the last of
September, Jane was sitting in a place by herself under her tree. She
could not say how or at what moment the incredible thing happened, but
of a sudden the world she looked at became luminous and insubstantial
and divinely still. She could not tell whether the stillness of the
world had passed into her heart, or her heart into the stillness of the
world. She could not tell what had happened to her at all. She only knew
that after it had happened, a little while after, something woke out of
sleep in her brain, and it was then that she saw Hambleby.

Up till this moment Hambleby had been only an idea in her head, and
Tanqueray had taught her a profound contempt for ideas in her head. And
the idea of Hambleby, of a little suburban banker's clerk, was one that
he had defied her to deal with; she could not, he had said, really see
him. She had given him up and forgotten all about him.

He arose with the oddest irrelevance out of the unfathomable peace. She
could not account for him, nor understand why, when she was incapable of
seeing him a year ago, she should see him now with such extreme
distinctness and solidity. She saw him, all pink and blond and callow
with excessive youth, advancing with his inevitable, suburban,
adolescent smile. She saw his soul, the soul he inevitably would have, a
blond and callow soul. She saw his Girl, the Girl he inevitably would
have. She was present at the mingling of that blond soul with the dark
flesh and blood of the Girl. She saw it all; the Innocence of Hambleby;
the Marriage of Hambleby; the Torture and subsequent Deterioration of
Hambleby; and, emerging in a sort of triumph, the indestructible Decency
of Hamb