above
reproach. She was an unusually original and attractive creature, to whom
he had wanted to give a few days of harmless pleasuring, and who was
alert and expert enough to understand his intention and spare him the
boredom of hesitations and misinterpretations. That had been his first
impression, and her subsequent demeanour had justified it. She had been,
from the outset, just the frank and easy comrade he had expected to find
her. Was it he, then, who, in the sequel, had grown impatient of the
bounds he had set himself? Was it his wounded vanity that, seeking
balm for its hurt, yearned to dip deeper into the healing pool of her
compassion? In his confused memory of the situation he seemed not to
have been guiltless of such yearnings...Yet for the first few days
the experiment had been perfectly successful. Her enjoyment had been
unclouded and his pleasure in it undisturbed. It was very gradually--he
seemed to see--that a shade of lassitude had crept over their
intercourse. Perhaps it was because, when her light chatter about people
failed, he found she had no other fund to draw on, or perhaps simply
because of the sweetness of her laugh, or of the charm of the gesture
with which, one day in the woods of Marly, she had tossed off her hat
and tilted back her head at the call of a cuckoo; or because, whenever
he looked at her unexpectedly, he found that she was looking at him and
did not want him to know it; or perhaps, in varying degrees, because of
all these things, that there had come a moment when no word seemed to
fly high enough or dive deep enough to utter the sense of well-being
each gave to the other, and the natural substitute for speech had been a
kiss.

The kiss, at all events, had come at the precise moment to save their
venture from disaster. They had reached the point when her amazing
reminiscences had begun to flag, when her future had been exhaustively
discussed, her theatrical prospects minutely studied, her quarrel with
Mrs. Murrett retold with the last amplification of detail, and when,
perhaps conscious of her exhausted resources and his dwindling interest,
she had committed the fatal error of saying that she could see he was
unhappy, and entreating him to tell her why...

From the brink of estranging confidences, and from the risk of
unfavourable comparisons, his gesture had snatched her back to safety;
and as soon as he had kissed her he felt that she would never bore him
again. She was one of