she answered.

"It is nevertheless true and I think that you do believe it. What have
I done that you should all of a sudden build a fence around yourself?"

"That may be," she replied, smiling, "for my own protection. I can
assure you that I am not used to tete-a-tete luncheons with guests who
insist upon having their own way in everything."

"I wonder if it is a good thing for you to be so much your own
mistress," he reflected.

"You must judge by results. I always have been--at least since I
decided to lead this sort of life."

"Why have you never married?" he asked her, a little abruptly.

"We discussed that before, didn't we? I suppose because the right man
has never asked me."

"Perhaps," he ventured, "the right man isn't able to."

"Perhaps there isn't any right man at all--perhaps there never will be."

The minutes ticked away. The room, with its mingled perfumes and
pleasant warmth, its manifold associations with her wholesome and
orderly life, seemed to have laid a sort of spell upon him. She was
leaning back in her corner of the lounge, her hands hanging over the
sides, her eyes fixed upon the burning log. She herself was so
abstracted that he ventured to let his eyes dwell upon her, to trace the
outline of her slim but powerful limbs, to admire her long, delicate
feet and hands, the strong womanly face, with its kindly mouth and soft,
almost affectionate eyes. Tallente, who for the last ten years had
looked upon the other sex as non-existent, crushed into an uninteresting
negation for him owing to his wife's cold and shadowy existence, twice
within the last few months found himself pass in a different way under
the greatest spell in life. Nora Miall had provoked his curiosity, had
reawakened a dormant sense of sex without attracting it towards herself.
Jane brought to him again, from the first moment he had seen her, that
half-wistful recrudescence of the sentiment of his earlier days. He was
amazed to find how once more in her presence that sentiment had taken to
itself fire and life, how different a thing it was from those first
dreams of her, which had seemed like an echo from the period of his
poetry-reading youth. Of all women in the world she seemed to him now
the most desirable. That she was unattainable he was perfectly willing
to admit. Even then he had not the strength to deny himself the
doubtful joys of imagination with regard to her. He revelled in her
proximity because of the pleasur