ity which persons who live desperate lives
necessarily inspire in the leisured, speculative mind. One of them
deliberately approached him from a side-street. Though taller and
fuller, with heightened colour, frizzy hair, and a hat with feathers;
she was the image of the little model--the same shape of face, broad
cheek-bones, mouth a little open; the same flower-coloured eyes and
short black lashes, all coarsened and accentuated as Art coarsens and
accentuates the lines of life. Looking boldly into Hilary's startled
face, she laughed. Hilary winced and walked on quickly.

He reached home at half-past ten. The lamp was burning in Mr. Stone's
room, and his window was, as usual, open; that which was not usual,
however, was a light in Hilary's own bedroom. He went gently up. Through
the door-ajar-he saw, to his surprise, the figure of his wife. She was
reclining in a chair, her elbows on its arms, the tips of her fingers
pressed together. Her face, with its dark hair, vivid colouring, and
sharp lines, was touched with shadows, her head turned as though towards
somebody beside her; her neck gleamed white. So--motionless, dimly
seen--she was like a woman sitting alongside her own life, scrutinising,
criticising, watching it live, taking no part in it. Hilary wondered
whether to go in or slip away from his strange visitor.

"Ah! it's you," she said.

Hilary approached her. For all her mocking of her own charms, this wife
of his was strangely graceful. After nineteen years in which to learn
every line of her face and body, every secret of her nature, she still
eluded him; that elusiveness, which had begun by being such a charm, had
got on his nerves, and extinguished the flame it had once lighted. He
had so often tried to see, and never seen, the essence of her soul. Why
was she made like this? Why was she for ever mocking herself, himself,
and every other thing? Why was she so hard to her own life, so bitter a
foe to her own happiness? Leonardo da Vinci might have painted her, less
sensual and cruel than his women, more restless and disharmonic, but
physically, spiritually enticing, and, by her refusals to surrender
either to her spirit or her senses, baffling her own enticements.

"I don't know why I came," she said.

Hilary found no better answer than: "I am sorry I was out to dinner."

"Has the wind gone round? My room is cold."

"Yes, north-east. Stay here."

Her hand touched his; that warm and restless clasp was a