Walk, and she had a cousin
who was a policeman in the town. No, no, it would not have been a
suitable marriage."

He moved restlessly in his chair, vexed by a sense of guilt, which
although he immediately mitigated it into a suspicion that he might have
behaved more wisely, made his memory maliciously busy opening doors
which he had believed he had locked. But he was so expert in the
gymnastic art of standing well with himself and the world that he could
turn each recollected incident to a cause of self-approbation before he
had begun to flush. For a few moments, using the idioms of Burns'
love-lyrics, which were the only dignified and unobscene references to
passion he had ever encountered, he thought of that night when he had
persuaded little Isabella to linger in the fosse of shadow under the
high wall in Canaan Lane and give up her mouth to his kisses, her tiny
warm dove's body to his arms. Never in all the forty-five intervening
years had he seen such a wall on such a night, its base in velvety
darkness and its topmost half shining ghostly as plaster does in
moonlight, without his hands remembering the queer pleasure it had been
to crush crisp muslin, without his heart remembering the joy it had been
to coax from primness its first consent to kisses. Before he could
reproach himself for having turned that perfect hour into a shame to her
who gave it by his later treachery, he began to reflect what a steady
young fellow he had been to have known no other amorous incident in all
his unmarried days than this innocent fondling on a summer's night.

But there pressed in on him the recollection of how she had dwined away
when she realised that, though he had kissed her, he did not mean to
marry her. He saw again the pale face she ever after wore; he remembered
how, when he met her in the street, she used at first to droop her head
and blush, until her will lifted her chin like a bearing-rein and she
forced herself to a proud blank stare, while her small stature worked to
make her crinoline an indignant spreading majesty behind her. Yet, after
all, she was not the only person to be inconvenienced, for he had fashed
himself a great deal over the business and had slept very badly for a
time. He exhorted her reproachful ghost not to be selfish. Besides, she
had somehow brought it on herself by looking what she did; for her dark
eyes, very bright, yet with a kind of bloom on them, and her full though
tiny underlip had always