ee that Anne had
not yet got over her discovery. The shock of it was in her nerves. He
felt that she shrank from him, and his chivalry still spared her.

He ceased to be her husband and became her very courteous, very distant
lover. He made no claims, and took nothing for granted. He simply began
all over again from the very beginning. His conscience was vaguely
appeased by the illusion of the new leaf, the rejuvenated innocence of
the blank page. They had never been married (so the illusion suggested).
There had been no revelations. They met as strangers in their own house,
at their own table. In support of this pleasing fiction he set about his
courtship with infinite precautions. He found himself exaggerating Anne's
distance and the lapse of intimacy. He made his way slowly, through all
the recognised degrees, from mere acquaintance, through friendship to
permissible fervour.

And from time to time, with incomparable discretion, he would withhold
himself that he might make himself more precious. He was hardly aware of
his own restraint, his refinements of instinct and of mood. It was as if
he drew, in his desperate necessity, upon unrealised, untried resources.
There was something in Anne that checked the primitive impulse of swift
chase, and called forth the curious half-feminine cunning of the
sophisticated pursuer. She froze at his ardour, but his coldness almost
kindled her, so that he approached by withdrawals and advanced by
flights.

He displayed, first of all, a heavenly ignorance, an inspired curiosity
regarding her. He consulted her tastes, as if he had never known them; he
started the time-honoured lovers' topics; he talked about books--which
she preferred and the reasons for her preference.

He did not advance very far that way. Anne was simply annoyed at the
lapses in his memory.

He then began to buy books on the chance of her liking them, which
answered better.

He promoted himself by degrees to personalities. He talked to her about
herself, handling her with religious reticence as a thing of holy and
incomprehensible mystery.

"I suppose," he said one day, "if I were good enough, I should understand
you. Why do you sigh like that? Is it because I'm not good enough? Or
because I don't understand?"

"I think," said she, "it is because I don't understand you."

"My dear" (he allowed himself at this point the more formal endearment),
"I thought I was disgracefully transparent--I'm limpidity, si