id.

Her eyes brimmed. "You are the only person who cares about that, Abel."

"Why shouldn't I care? You are the best and the cleverest girl I know,"
he returned.

Her gratitude fanned his sympathy, which was beginning to smoulder, and
he felt again the pleasant sense of being in the position of benefactor
rather than of the benefited. His eyes rested without shrinking on her
sallow face, with the faint bluish tinge to the eyelids, and on her
scant drab coloured hair, which was combed smoothly back from her
forehead--and while he looked his pity clothed itself in the softer and
gentler aspect of reason. "She ought to be happy," he thought. "It's
a shame they should lead her such a life! It's a shame some good man
doesn't fall in love with her and marry her. She's really not so plain,
after all. I've seen many women who were worse looking than she is."
Unknown to him, an illusion was gradually shedding colour and warmth on
his vision of her. Mentally, he had endowed her with all the sober and
saner virtues to which his present mood was committed--though he had, in
reality, no better reason for so doing than the fact that she evidently
esteemed him and that she was deserving of pity. The discordant forces
of passion no longer disturbed the calm and orderly processes of his
mind, and he told himself that he saw clearly, because he saw stark
images of facts, stripped not only of the glamour of light and shade,
but even of the body of flesh and blood. Life spread before him like
a geometrical figure, constructed of perfect circles and absolutely
conformable to the rules and the principles of mathematics. That these
perfect circles should ever run wild and become a square was clearly
unthinkable. Because his nature was not quiescent it was impossible for
him to conceive of it in motion.

And all the while, in that silence, which seemed so harmless while it
was, in reality, so dangerous, the repressed yet violent force in
Judy wrought on his mood in which bare sense and bare thought were
unprotected by any covering of the love which had clothed them as far
back as he could remember. That breathless, palpitating appeal for
happiness--an appeal which is as separate from beauty as the body of
flesh is separate from the garment it wears--was drawing him slowly yet
inevitably toward the woman at his side. Her silence--charged as it was
with the intoxicating spirit of June--had served the purpose of life as
neither words nor ges