ide she hurried towards
the high road as if she fled from something, catching her breath
sobbingly when the darkness was so thick that she could not run,
although he told her many times that there was no need for haste. "See,"
he said, as they took their stand at the cross-roads, "the bus isn't
anywhere in sight yet." But she did not answer him, and he became aware
that she was trembling. "Are you cold? Would you like my coat?" he
asked, but she murmured a little broken mouseish refusal. Could it
possibly be that she was frightened of being alone with him in the dark?
He had to own to himself that she would have been afraid of him if she
had known some of the things that he had done, although he did not admit
that her fear would be anything more than a child's harsh judgment of
matters it did not understand. But no rumours could have reached her
ears, for he had always lived very secretly, even beyond the needs of
discretion, since he knew that the passive sort of women with whom, for
the most part, he had had dealings have an enormous power of
self-deception, and could, as the years went on, if there were no
witnesses to dispute it, pretend to themselves that what had happened
with him was no reality but only a naughty dream that had come to them
between sleeping and waking.

It came to him like a feeling of sickness that it was not absolutely
impossible that those Christians, in spite of that personal
ridiculousness which he had noticed in nearly all of them, were right.
It might be that sin was sin and left a stain, and that those things
which had appeared to him as innocently sweet as a bathe in a summer
sea, and which he had believed to end utterly with dawn and the stealthy
shutting of a door, had somehow left him loathsome to this girl. He
perceived that there might have been a meaning adverse to him in the way
she had delayed, in despite of her own wish to hurry, and pinned up her
hair. Perhaps she had seen something in his face which made her shiver
with apprehension that his hands might touch it; not because it was her
hair, but because they were his hands and had acquired a habit of
fingering women's beauties. But indeed he was not like that. He sweated
with panic, and raged silently against this streak of materialism in
women that makes them so grossly dwell on the physical events in a man's
life. This agony of tenderness he felt for her now, this passion of
worship that kept half his mind inactive yet tense