s now acutely aware of the
other. Ann Veronica was excited and puzzled, with a sense of a strange
and disconcerting new light breaking over her relations with Ramage.
She had never thought of him at all in that way before. It did not shock
her; it amazed her, interested her beyond measure. But also this must
not go on. She felt he was going to say something more--something
still more personal and intimate. She was curious, and at the same time
clearly resolved she must not hear it. She felt she must get him talking
upon some impersonal theme at any cost. She snatched about in her mind.
"What is the exact force of a motif?" she asked at random. "Before I
heard much Wagnerian music I heard enthusiastic descriptions of it from
a mistress I didn't like at school. She gave me an impression of a sort
of patched quilt; little bits of patterned stuff coming up again and
again."

She stopped with an air of interrogation.

Ramage looked at her for a long and discriminating interval without
speaking. He seemed to be hesitating between two courses of action. "I
don't know much about the technique of music," he said at last, with his
eyes upon her. "It's a matter of feeling with me."

He contradicted himself by plunging into an exposition of motifs.

By a tacit agreement they ignored the significant thing between them,
ignored the slipping away of the ground on which they had stood together
hitherto....

All through the love music of the second act, until the hunting horns of
Mark break in upon the dream, Ann Veronica's consciousness was flooded
with the perception of a man close beside her, preparing some new thing
to say to her, preparing, perhaps, to touch her, stretching hungry
invisible tentacles about her. She tried to think what she should do in
this eventuality or that. Her mind had been and was full of the thought
of Capes, a huge generalized Capes-lover. And in some incomprehensible
way, Ramage was confused with Capes; she had a grotesque disposition to
persuade herself that this was really Capes who surrounded her, as it
were, with wings of desire. The fact that it was her trusted friend
making illicit love to her remained, in spite of all her effort, an
insignificant thing in her mind. The music confused and distracted her,
and made her struggle against a feeling of intoxication. Her head swam.
That was the inconvenience of it; her head was swimming. The music
throbbed into the warnings that preceded the king's irru