r upon me, a certain slight rounded duskiness
of skin, a certain perfection of modelling in her lips, her brow, a
certain fine flow about the shoulders. She wasn't indeed beautiful
to many people--these things are beyond explaining. She had manifest
defects of form and feature, and they didn't matter at all. Her
complexion was bad, but I don't think it would have mattered if it
had been positively unwholesome. I had extraordinarily limited,
extraordinarily painful, desires. I longed intolerably to kiss her lips.

V

The affair was immensely serious and commanding to me. I don't remember
that in these earlier phases I had any thought of turning back at
all. It was clear to me that she regarded me with an eye entirely
more critical than I had for her, that she didn't like my scholarly
untidiness, my want of even the most commonplace style. "Why do you
wear collars like that?" she said, and sent me in pursuit of gentlemanly
neckwear. I remember when she invited me a little abruptly one day to
come to tea at her home on the following Sunday and meet her father
and mother and aunt, that I immediately doubted whether my hitherto
unsuspected best clothes would create the impression she desired me to
make on her belongings. I put off the encounter until the Sunday after,
to get myself in order. I had a morning coat made and I bought a silk
hat, and had my reward in the first glance of admiration she ever gave
me. I wonder how many of my sex are as preposterous. I was, you see,
abandoning all my beliefs, my conventions unasked. I was forgetting
myself immensely. And there was a conscious shame in it all. Never a
word--did I breathe to Ewart--to any living soul of what was going on.

Her father and mother and aunt struck me as the dismalest of people,
and her home in Walham Green was chiefly notable for its black and
amber tapestry carpets and curtains and table-cloths, and the age and
irrelevance of its books, mostly books with faded gilt on the covers.
The windows were fortified against the intrusive eye by cheap lace
curtains and an "art pot" upon an unstable octagonal table. Several
framed Art School drawings of Marion's, bearing official South
Kensington marks of approval, adorned the room, and there was a black
and gilt piano with a hymn-book on the top of it. There were draped
mirrors over all the mantels, and above the sideboard in the dining-room
in which we sat at tea was a portrait of her father, villainously
truthf