, and, though she went to the
mantelpiece, it was not to revise the rough draft of her dressing at the
glass, but to fish some money out of a ginger-jar. She brought the
coins over to the table and began to arrange them in little heaps,
evidently making some calculation concerning the domestic finance, while
her face assumed a curious expression of contemptuous thrift. It was as
if she was making her reckoning with scrupulous accuracy and at the same
time ridiculing her own penury and promising herself that there would
come a time when she should make calculations concerning the treasures
of emperors. She was deluding herself with dreams of the time when she
should have crowned herself queen or made herself the hidden
tyrant-saviour of an industry. He detested her ambition: he felt it to
be a kind of spiritual adultery; he moved his clenched hand forward on
the table till it almost touched her money. Immediately she ceased to
add, slowly her gaze travelled from his fingers to his face, and she
smiled a disturbed smile that expressed at first the greeting that one
beautiful animal gives to another, and then poetic wonder at his beauty,
and then happiness because they liked each other so, and at last it
became a sheer grimace of courage because the happiness was turning into
a slight physical misery because there was something she ought to do or
say, and she did not know what it was. And he was smiling too, because
he perfectly knew what she did not.

One of the candles had burnt to its socket, and at its guttering arms of
shadow seemed to whirl about them, and at its death the darkness seemed
to bend forward from the corners of the room and press them closer to
each other. Very soon she would be in his arms, and there would be an
exquisite, exciting contrast between the rough texture of the coat that
his hands would grasp and the smooth skin that his lips would meet. But
there would not. The passion that possessed him was so strong that it
killed sensation. He desired her body ardently, but only because it was
inhabited by her soul, for their flesh had become unreal. He felt an
exaltation, an illusion that he was being interpenetrated with light,
and the loveliness that he had thought of as Ellen seemed now only a
richly coloured film blown round the fact of her. If he wanted to hold
her close to him it was only that he might shatter these frail
substances with a harsh embrace and let their liberated souls stream out
lik