s not one so
beautiful as Ellen, and he walked waveringly on, wrathful at the way she
insisted on being valuable when he wanted to despise her. A woman who
had been watching him for some time, and who knew from a wide experience
that he was in one of those aching miseries which make men turn to such
as she, slipped from the shadows and murmured to him. She was taller
than he, and had to bend her long slender neck that he might hear. He
hated her for being a streetwalker and for being taller than he, and
began to swear at her. But before he could get the words out of his
mouth she had wiped the smile from her pale oval face with the adeptness
of a proud woman who had long preserved her pride in the fields of
contempt, and glided away with a dignity that denied what she was and
what had happened. That struck him as a monstrous breach of the social
contract, for surely if a woman was a bad woman she ought to stay still
until one had finished swearing at her.

But all these women were vile. There was no measure to the vileness that
Ellen had brought on him. For it was all her fault, since he never would
have gone with that woman in London if it had not been for the way she
had carried on the evening before. At the thought of that night in
Piccadilly he began to hurry along the street, pushing in and out among
the people as if he insanely hoped to lose the humiliating memory as one
can lose a dog, until he remembered how he had had to hurry along beside
the London woman because she was a great striding creature and he found
it difficult to keep step, and then he walked slowly. It had all been so
ugly, and it was a fraud too. It had been his belief that the advantage
of prostitution was that it gave one command over women like Ellen
without bringing on one the trouble that would certainly follow if one
did ill to Ellen; for even if nobody ever found out, she would look at
one with those eyes. But this woman was not in the least like Ellen. He
had chosen her rather than the girl in the white boots at the other side
of the pavement because he thought she had hair like Ellen, but when she
took her hat off he saw that she had not. It was funny stuff, with an
iridescence on it as if she had been rubbing it with furniture polish.
Her flat, too, was not kept as Ellen would have kept it. And she had not
been kind, as Ellen, when she moved softly as a cloud about the office
fetching him things, or sat listening, with chin cupped in her