p, drowning the compartment in a bluish twilight.

As he sank back into his seat he thought how differently Anna
Summers--or even Anna Leath--would have behaved. She would not have
talked too much; she would not have been either restless or embarrassed;
but her adaptability, her appropriateness, would not have been
nature but "tact." The oddness of the situation would have made sleep
impossible, or, if weariness had overcome her for a moment, she would
have waked with a start, wondering where she was, and how she had come
there, and if her hair were tidy; and nothing short of hairpins and a
glass would have restored her self-possession...

The reflection set him wondering whether the "sheltered" girl's
bringing-up might not unfit her for all subsequent contact with life.
How much nearer to it had Mrs. Leath been brought by marriage and
motherhood, and the passage of fourteen years? What were all her
reticences and evasions but the result of the deadening process of
forming a "lady"? The freshness he had marvelled at was like the
unnatural whiteness of flowers forced in the dark.

As he looked back at their few days together he saw that their
intercourse had been marked, on her part, by the same hesitations and
reserves which had chilled their earlier intimacy. Once more they had
had their hour together and she had wasted it. As in her girlhood, her
eyes had made promises which her lips were afraid to keep. She was still
afraid of life, of its ruthlessness, its danger and mystery. She was
still the petted little girl who cannot be left alone in the dark...His
memory flew back to their youthful story, and long-forgotten details
took shape before him. How frail and faint the picture was! They seemed,
he and she, like the ghostly lovers of the Grecian Urn, forever pursuing
without ever clasping each other. To this day he did not quite know
what had parted them: the break had been as fortuitous as the fluttering
apart of two seed-vessels on a wave of summer air...

The very slightness, vagueness, of the memory gave it an added
poignancy. He felt the mystic pang of the parent for a child which
has just breathed and died. Why had it happened thus, when the least
shifting of influences might have made it all so different? If she had
been given to him then he would have put warmth in her veins and light
in her eyes: would have made her a woman through and through. Musing
thus, he had the sense of waste that is the bitterest h