etween
them was all hers, and the things she said to him had still the flavour
of adventure. She found herself inclined--and the experience was new--to
make an effort for a reward which was problematical and had to be
considered in averages, a reward put out in a thin and hesitating hand
under a sacerdotal robe, with a curious, concentrated quality and a
strange flavour of incense and the air of cold churches. There was also
the impression--was it too fantastic--of words carried over a medium, an
invisible wire which brought the soul of them and left the body by the
way. Duff Lindsay, so eminently responsive and calculable, came running
with open arms; in his rejoiceful eye-beam one saw almost a midwife to
one's idea. But the comparison was subtly irritating, and after a time
she turned from it. She awoke once in the night, moreover, to declare to
the stars that she was less worried by the consideration of Arnold's sex
than she would have thought it possible to be--one hardly paused to
consider that he was a man at all; a reflection which would certainly
not have occurred to her about poor dear Duff. With regard to Stephen
Arnold, it was only, of course, another way of saying that she was less
oppressed, in his company, by the consideration of her own. Perhaps it
is already evident that this was her grievance with life, when the joy
of if left her time to think of a grievance, the attraction of her
personal curves, the reason of the hundred fetiches her body claimed of
her and found her willing to perform: the fact that it meant more to
her, for all her theories, that she should be looking her best when she
got up in the morning than was justifiable from any point of view except
the biological. She had no heroic quarrel with these conditions--her
experience had not been upon that plan--but she bemoaned them with
sincerity as too fundamental, too all-pervading; one came upon them at
every turn, grinning in their pretty chains. It was absurd, she
construed, that a world of mankind and womankind with vastly interesting
possibilities should be so essentially subjected to a single end. So
primitive, it was, she argued in her vivid candour, and so
interfering--so horribly interfering! Personally she did not see herself
one of the fugitive half of the race; she had her defences; but the
necessity of using them was matter for complaint when existence might
have been so delightful a boon without it, full of affinities and
communi