d up to the mirrors as if about to challenge them, peering in.
He knew he would look absurd, and then knew, with shame, that he looked
splendidly better than most of the gentlemen that Freda Buckler knew. He
hated himself. A man who had grown out of the city's streets, a fine
common thing!

She saw him looking into the mirrors, one after the other, and drew her
mouth down. She got up, walking beside him in the end, between him and
them, taking his arm.

"You shall enter the army--you shall rise to General, or Lieutenant at
least--and there are horses there, and the sound of stirrups--with that
physique you will be happy--authority you know," she said shaking her
chin, smiling.

"Very well, but a common soldier--"

"As you like--afterward."

"Afterward?"

"Very well, a common soldier."

He sensed something strange in her voice, a sort of irony and it took
the patience out of him:

"I have always been common, I could commit crimes, easily, gladly--I'd
like to!"

She looked away. "That's natural," she said faintly, "it's an instinct
all strong men have--"

She knew what was troubling him, thwarted instincts, common beautiful
instincts that he was being robbed of. He wanted to do something final
to prove his lower order; caught himself making faces, idiot faces, and
she laughed.

"If only your ears stuck out, chin receded," she said, "you might look
degenerate, common, but as it is--"

And he would creep away in hat, coat and cane to peer at his horses,
never daring to go in near them. Sometimes when he wanted to weep he
would smear one glove with harness grease, but the other one he held
behind his back, pretending one was enough to prove his revolt.

She would torment him with vases, books, pictures, making a fool of him
gently, persistently, making him doubt by cruel means, the means of
objects he was not used to, eternally taking him out of his sphere.

"We have the best collection of miniatures," she would say with one knee
on a low ottoman, bringing them out in her small palm.

"Here, look."

He would put his hands behind him.

"She was a great woman--Lucrezia Borgia--do you know history--" She put
it back again because he did not answer, letting his mind, a curious
one, torment itself.

"You love things very much, don't you?" she would question because she
knew that he had a passion for one thing only. She kept placing new
ladders beneath his feet, only to saw them off at the next rung, makin