or at any time, for that matter. Here was I, a Special
Correspondent, going out to the war; and there, on the other side of the
Channel, _was_ the war; in the fields of France and of Flanders men were
fighting, men were slaughtering each other every day by thousands. I was
a man and I should have been thinking of those men; and here I was,
compelled against my conscience and my will to think of this woman. She
had come out with me against my conscience and my will, and against my
judgment and my good taste and my honour and my common sense, against
everything in me that I set most store by. I hadn't meant to take her
with me, and she had made me take her.

And when my common sense told me that she hadn't; that I wasn't taking
her, and that she had as much right to be on the Ostend boat as I had, I
still resented her being there. I still raged as I realized the power she
had over me. She had always had it. She had had it the first day I ever
saw her, when she had walked into my rooms against my orders, half an
hour behind the time I had appointed, and had made herself my secretary
against my will. She had had it when she used me as a stalking-horse
to draw her brother's suspicions away from her and Jevons; she had had it
when she drew me after her to Belgium, and when I followed her from
Bruges to Canterbury at her bidding; she had had it when I married Norah
(hadn't she told me, in the insolence of it, that she had meant that I
should marry Norah?). She had had it, this malign power over me, the
other night, and she had it now. She always would have it.

It wasn't my fault, I told myself, if she compelled me to look at her,
this time, as I passed her deck-chair.

I looked at her, and she sent me a little sad interrogative smile that
asked me why I walked the decks thus savagely and alone? And I paid no
attention to her or to her smile. In the very arrogance of isolation I
continued to walk the decks. I meant her to see that I _could_ be alone
and savage if I liked.

And when I looked at her again (she couldn't have _made_ me this time,
for she was unaware of me, lost in some profound meditation of her own),
when I looked at her again my anger and my resentment died with a sort of
struggle and a pang.

She had, after all, the grace of her ignorance and innocence. If she had
had no pity on me, it was because she was as blind as she had said I was.
She didn't, she couldn't see me as she had made me see myself. She did