as the most wonderful and beautiful thing
in life, and her eyes, the intonation of her voice, her hurrying color
and a hundred little involuntary signs told me how she quickened at my
coming. But there was a shyness. I loved her as one loves and admires a
white flower or a beautiful child--some stranger's child. I felt that I
might make her afraid of me. I had never before thought that to make
love is a coarse thing. But still at high summer when I met Mary again
no definite thing had been said between myself and Rachel. But we knew,
each of us knew, that somewhere in a world less palpable, in fairyland,
in dreamland, we had met and made our vows.

Sec. 5

You see how far my imagination had gone towards readjustment when Mary
returned into my life. You see how strange and distant it was to meet
her again, changed completely into the great lady she had intended to
be, speaking to me with the restrained and practised charm of a woman
who is young and beautiful and prominent and powerful and secure. There
was no immediate sense of shock in that resumption of our broken
intercourse, it seemed to me that night simply that something odd and
curious had occurred. I do not remember how we parted that evening or
whether we even saw each other after dinner was over, but from that hour
forth Mary by insensible degrees resumed her old predominance in my
mind. I woke up in the night and thought about her, and next day I found
myself thinking of her, remembering things out of the past and recalling
and examining every detail of the overnight encounter. How cold and
ineffective we had been, both of us! We had been like people resuming a
disused and partially forgotten language. Had she changed towards me?
Did she indeed want to see me again or was that invitation a mere
demonstration of how entirely unimportant seeing me or not seeing me had
become?

Then I would find myself thinking with the utmost particularity of her
face. Had it changed at all? Was it altogether changed? I seemed to have
forgotten everything and remembered everything; that peculiar slight
thickness of her eyelids that gave her eyes their tenderness, that light
firmness of her lips. Of course she would want to talk to me, as now I
perceived I wanted to talk to her.

Was I in love with her still? It seemed to me then that I was not. It
had not been that hesitating fierceness, that pride and demand and
doubt, which is passionate love, that had made all my sensa