n love with her.

Supposing he went to her and said (he slackened his pace and began to
speak aloud, as if he were speaking to Rachel):

"I worship you, but I loathe marriage, I hate its smugness, its safety,
its compromise, and the thought of you interfering in my work, hindering
me; what would you answer?"

He stopped, leant against the trunk of a tree, and gazed without seeing
them at some stones scattered on the bank of the dry river-bed. He saw
Rachel's face distinctly, the grey eyes, the hair, the mouth; the face
that could look so many things--plain, vacant, almost insignificant, or
wild, passionate, almost beautiful, yet in his eyes was always the same
because of the extraordinary freedom with which she looked at him, and
spoke as she felt. What would she answer? What did she feel? Did she
love him, or did she feel nothing at all for him or for any other man,
being, as she had said that afternoon, free, like the wind or the sea?

"Oh, you're free!" he exclaimed, in exultation at the thought of her,
"and I'd keep you free. We'd be free together. We'd share everything
together. No happiness would be like ours. No lives would compare with
ours." He opened his arms wide as if to hold her and the world in one
embrace.

No longer able to consider marriage, or to weigh coolly what her nature
was, or how it would be if they lived together, he dropped to the ground
and sat absorbed in the thought of her, and soon tormented by the desire
to be in her presence again.

Chapter XIX

But Hewet need not have increased his torments by imagining that Hirst
was still talking to Rachel. The party very soon broke up, the Flushings
going in one direction, Hirst in another, and Rachel remaining in the
hall, pulling the illustrated papers about, turning from one to another,
her movements expressing the unformed restless desire in her mind.
She did not know whether to go or to stay, though Mrs. Flushing had
commanded her to appear at tea. The hall was empty, save for Miss
Willett who was playing scales with her fingers upon a sheet of sacred
music, and the Carters, an opulent couple who disliked the girl, because
her shoe laces were untied, and she did not look sufficiently cheery,
which by some indirect process of thought led them to think that she
would not like them. Rachel certainly would not have liked them, if
she had seen them, for the excellent reason that Mr. Carter waxed his
moustache, and Mrs. Carter wore b