gton Gardens on the first bench they came to.
The little model sat down beside him. The quiet siege laid to him by
this girl was quite uncanny. It was as though someone were binding him
with toy threads, swelling slowly into rope before his eyes. In this
fear of Hilary's there was at first much irritation. His fastidiousness
and sense of the ridiculous were roused. What did this little creature
with whom he had no thoughts and no ideas in common, whose spirit and his
could never hope to meet, think that she could get from him? Was she
trying to weave a spell over him too, with her mute, stubborn adoration?
Was she trying to change his protective weakness for her to another sort
of weakness? He turned and looked; she dropped her eyes at once, and sat
still as a stone figure.

As in her spirit, so in her body, she was different; her limbs looked
freer, rounder; her breath seemed stirring her more deeply; like a flower
of early June she was opening before his very eyes. This, though it gave
him pleasure, also added to his fear. The strange silence, in its utter
naturalness--for what could he talk about with her?--brought home to him
more vividly than anything before, the barriers of class. All he thought
of was how not to be ridiculous! She was inviting him in some strange,
unconscious, subtle way to treat her as a woman, as though in spirit she
had linked her round young arms about his neck, and through her
half-closed lips were whispering the eternal call of sex to sex. And he,
a middle-aged and cultivated man, conscious of everything, could not even
speak for fear of breaking through his shell of delicacy. He hardly
breathed, disturbed to his very depths by the young figure sitting by his
side, and by the dread of showing that disturbance.

Beside the cultivated plant the self-sown poppy rears itself; round the
stem of a smooth tree the honeysuckle twines; to a trim wall the ivy
clings.

In her new-found form and purpose this girl had gained a strange, still
power; she no longer felt it mattered whether he spoke or looked at her;
her instinct, piercing through his shell, was certain of the throbbing of
his pulses, the sweet poison in his blood.

The perception of this still power, more than all else, brought fear to
Hilary. He need not speak; she would not care! He need not even look at
her; she had but to sit there silent, motionless, with the breath of
youth coming through her parted lips, and the li