is element, than to condemn
oneself to the routine of a job? He would have been curious and
dishuman. But after all, it would have been an experience. In a way,
she liked him. There was something odd and integral about him, which
she liked. He was not a liar. In his own line, he was honest and
direct. Then he would take her to South Africa: a whole new
_milieu_. And perhaps she would have children. She shivered a
little. No, not his children! He seemed so curiously cold-blooded.
And yet, why not? Why not his curious, pale, half cold-blooded
children, like little fishes of her own? Why not? Everything was
possible: and even desirable, once one could see the strangeness of
it. Once she could plunge through the wall of the aquarium! Once she
could kiss him!

Therefore Miss Pinnegar's quiet harping on the string was
unbearable.

"I can't understand that you disliked Mr. Witham so much?" said Miss
Pinnegar.

"We never can understand those things," said Alvina. "I can't
understand why I dislike tapioca and arrowroot--but I do."

"That's different," said Miss Pinnegar shortly.

"It's no more easy to understand," said Alvina.

"Because there's no need to understand it," said Miss Pinnegar.

"And is there need to understand the other?"

"Certainly. I can see nothing wrong with him," said Miss Pinnegar.

Alvina went away in silence. This was in the first months after she
had given Albert his dismissal. He was at Oxford again--would not
return to Woodhouse till Christmas. Between her and the Woodhouse
Withams there was a decided coldness. They never looked at her
now--nor she at them.

None the less, as Christmas drew near Alvina worked up her feelings.
Perhaps she would be reconciled to him. She would slip across and
smile to him. She would take the plunge, once and for all--and kiss
him and marry him and bear the little half-fishes, his children. She
worked herself into quite a fever of anticipation.

But when she saw him, the first evening, sitting stiff and staring
flatly in front of him in Chapel, staring away from everything in
the world, at heaven knows what--just as fishes stare--then his
dishumanness came over her again like an arrest, and arrested all
her flights of fancy. He stared flatly in front of him, and flatly
set a wall of oblivion between him and her. She trembled and let be.

After Christmas, however, she had nothing at all to think forward
to. And it was then she seemed to shrink: she seemed po