felt--was the flood of joy that comes of heightened emotion. She
had given me that, and I wanted her to give it to me again. That's as
near as I've ever come to analyzing my state in the beginning.

"I knew her story, as no doubt you know it: the current version, I
mean. She had been poor and fond of enjoyment, and she had married that
pompous stick Philip Trant because she needed a home, and perhaps also
because she wanted a little luxury. Queer how we sneer at women for
wanting the thing that gives them half their attraction!

"People shook their heads over the marriage, and divided, prematurely,
into Philip's partisans and hers: for no one thought it would work.
And they were almost disappointed when, after all, it did. She and her
wooden consort seemed to get on well enough. There was a ripple, at one
time, over her friendship with young Jim Dalham, who was always with her
during a summer at Newport and an autumn in Italy; then the talk died
out, and she and Trant were seen together, as before, on terms of
apparent good-fellowship.

"This was the more surprising because, from the first, Paulina had never
made the least attempt to change her tone or subdue her colours. In the
gray Trant atmosphere she flashed with prismatic fires. She smoked, she
talked subversively, she did as she liked and went where she chose, and
danced over the Trant prejudices and the Trant principles as if they'd
been a ball-room floor; and all without apparent offence to her solemn
husband and his cloud of cousins. I believe her frankness and directness
struck them dumb. She moved like a kind of primitive Una through the
virtuous rout, and never got a finger-mark on her freshness.

"One of the finest things about her was the fact that she never, for an
instant, used her situation as a means of enhancing her attraction. With
a husband like Trant it would have been so easy! He was a man who always
saw the small sides of big things. He thought most of life compressible
into a set of by-laws and the rest unmentionable; and with his stiff
frock-coated and tall-hatted mind, instinctively distrustful of
intelligences in another dress, with his arbitrary classification of
whatever he didn't understand into 'the kind of thing I don't approve
of,' 'the kind of thing that isn't done,' and--deepest depth of
all--'the kind of thing I'd rather not discuss,' he lived in bondage to
a shadowy moral etiquette of which the complex rites and awful penalties
h