modesty; if she could have approached him, and taken his hands
and pressed them to her bosom; if she had had the courage to force
upon him the mysterious influence of physical contact, Stephen's
control would have melted in the kindled fire.

Words stir the brain, and through the brain, the senses; but with
some people it's a long way round.

Touch stirs the nerves, and its flame runs through the body like a
flying pain.

Stephen's physical nerves were far more sensitive than his brain,
and had the girl been a woman of the half-world, or even of the
world, she could have succeeded. But she was a girl; and her
modesty and innocence, the chastity of all her mental and physical
being, hung like dead weights upon her in the encounter.

His words, his tones, his glance simply paralyze her--not
figuratively, but positively. Her physical power to move towards
him, to make a further appeal to him, is gone. Speech is dried upon
her lips, wiped from them as a handkerchief passed over them might
take their moisture.

She looks at him, dumb, frenzied with the intense longing to throw
herself actually at his feet, but yet held back by some
irresistible power she cannot comprehend, any more than one can
comprehend the stifling, overpowering force in a nightmare.

It is the simple result of her life, her breeding, her virtue, her
character, her habits of control and reserve. She is the
fashionable, well-brought-up girl, with all her sensitive instincts
in revolt against forcing herself upon a man indifferent to her,
and full of an overwhelming instinctive timidity that her desire is
wild to break down and cannot.

She stares at him, lost in a sense of bitter pain. All her vigorous
life seems wrung with pain, and in that torture, in which every
nerve seems bruised and quivering, a faint smile twists at last the
pale, trembling lips. "You would have made a good vivisector!" she
says. Then, before he has time to answer, she turns the handle of
the door behind her, opens it and goes out.

A second after the street door closes, and Stephen stands on the
dining-room mat, looking down the empty hall. Thoroughly disturbed
and excited, with all his own passion surging heavily through his
blood, and her last sentence--that he does not understand any more
than he understands his own cruelty--ringing in his ears, he
hesitates a minute, and then re-enters the dining-room, shuts to
the door, and walks savagely up and down.

"Extraordi