woman, could feel from
such a cause; but he struck himself as also knowing that he had already
suffered Kate to begin finely to apply antidotes and remedies and
subtle sedatives. It had a vulgar sound--as throughout, in love, the
names of things, the verbal terms of intercourse, were, compared with
love itself, horribly vulgar; but it was as if, after all, he might
have come back to find himself "put off," though it would take him of
course a day or two to see. His letters from the States had pleased
whom it concerned, though not so much as he had meant they should; and
he should be paid according to agreement and would now take up his
money. It wasn't in truth very much to take up, so that he hadn't in
the least come back flourishing a cheque-book; that new motive for
bringing his mistress to terms he couldn't therefore pretend to
produce. The ideal certainty would have been to be able to present a
change of prospect as a warrant for the change of philosophy, and
without it he should have to make shift but with the pretext of the
lapse of time. The lapse of time--not so many weeks after all, she
might always of course say--couldn't at any rate have failed to do
something for him; and that consideration it was that had just now
tided him over, all the more that he had his vision of what it had done
personally for Kate. This had come out for him with a splendour that
almost scared him even in their small corner of the room at
Euston--almost scared him because it just seemed to blaze at him that
waiting was the game of dupes. Not yet had she been so the creature he
had originally seen; not yet had he felt so soundly safely sure. It was
all there for him, playing on his pride of possession as a hidden
master in a great dim church might play on the grandest organ. His
final sense was that a woman couldn't be like that and then ask of one
the impossible.

She had been like that afresh on the morrow; and so for the hour they
had been able to float in the mere joy of contact--such contact as
their situation in pictured public halls permitted. This poor makeshift
for closeness confessed itself in truth, by twenty small signs of
unrest even on Kate's part, inadequate; so little could a decent
interest in the interesting place presume to remind them of its claims.
They had met there in order not to meet in the streets and not again,
with an equal want of invention and of style, at a railway-station; not
again, either, in Kensin