ng her, because I conceived that she
would be afraid of seeing me. I felt as if I had hunted her down and
caught her in a trap. I didn't want the bright, defiant creature to
crouch and flinch before me in her corner. And, as I tried to realize
our encounter, that was how I saw her--crouching and flinching in a
corner. It wouldn't have been quite so awful if the man had been any
other man but Jevons. I could not imagine a worse position for a girl
like Viola Thesiger than to be caught running off to Belgium, or
anywhere, with Jevons, and told to leave him and go home. Put brutally,
that was what I had to tell her.

The only way to do it was to ignore the unspeakable element in the
affair--to ignore Jevons. To behave as if I'd never heard of him; as if
she were just travelling in Belgium on her own account and staying in
Bruges alone.

And that--if she had only let me--was what I tried to do.

I remember vividly everything that passed in that interview, but I do not
know how to reproduce it, how to give anything like an impression of the
marvellous thing it was, or that it turned into under her hands. It
ought, you see, to have been so ugly, so humiliating, so absolutely
intolerable for both of us. And it wasn't. She took it from me, at the
end, and held it up, as it were a little way out of my grasp; and before
I knew where I was, with some sudden twist or turn she had brought beauty
out of it. Clear and exquisite beauty.

I found her in her room at the _pension_. It was at the back, on the
ground floor; and had long windows opening into a little high-walled
garden. The room, I remember, was rather dingy and stuffed up with
furniture. Large Flemish pieces, bureaus, chests and cabinets stood
against the walls. There was a bed behind the door; she had put her
travelling-rug over it. And there was a washstand in an alcove with a
curtain hung across it; and some of her coats and gowns hung behind
another curtain in a corner, and some were on hooks on the door. And her
little trunk was on the floor by the foot of the bed. And her shoes stood
by the stove.

Somehow, when I saw these things--especially the shoes--my heart melted
inside me with a tenderness that was infinitely more painful than the
rather austere disapproval of her which I had relied on for support.

I was prepared, as I said, for a cowed and frightened Viola, or for Viola
in a mood at least in keeping with the poignant and somewhat humbling
pathos of her