a woman thirsting for a
great experience, it was hard to find that the best things lay always
just beyond her reach; that in Ted's life, after all of it that she had
absorbed and made her own, there was still an elusive something on which
she had no hold. Not that she allowed this reflection to trouble her
happiness long. As Katherine had said, Ted was two people very
imperfectly rolled into one. Consciously or unconsciously, it became
more and more Audrey's aim to separate them, to play off the one against
the other. This called for but little skill on her part. Ted's passion
at its white-heat had fused together the boy's soul and the artist's,
but at any temperature short of that its natural effect was
disintegration. Audrey had some cause to congratulate herself on the
result. It might or might not have been flattering to be called a
"clever puss" or an "imaginative minx" (Ted chose his epithets at
random), whenever she pointed out some novel effect of colour or
picturesque grouping; but it was now July, and Ted had not done a stroke
of work since he put the last touches to her portrait in April.

It was now July, and from across the Atlantic came the first rumours of
Hardy's return. Within a month, or six weeks at the latest, he would be
in England, in London. The news set Audrey thinking, and think as she
would the question perpetually recurred, Whether would it be better to
announce her engagement to Ted, or still keep it a secret, still drift
on indefinitely as they had done for the last four months? If Audrey had
formed any idea of the future at all, it was as a confused mirage of
possibilities: visions of express trains in which she and Ted were
whirled on for ever through strange landscapes; visions of Parisian life
as she pictured it--a series of exquisite idyls, the long days of
quivering sunlight under blue skies, the brief languid nights dying into
dawn, coffee and rolls brought to you before you get up, strawberries
eaten with claret instead of cream because cream makes you ill in hot
climates, the Paris of fiction and the Paris of commonplace report; and
with it all, scene after scene in which she figured as doing a thousand
extravagant and interesting things, always dressed in appropriate
costumes, always making characteristic little speeches to Ted, who
invariably replied with some delicious absurdity. The peculiarity of
these scenes was, that though they succeeded each other through endless
time, yet