They were all listening, and Alice Bartrum had made fresh tea for her;
McClane was setting down her cup. She was thirsty; she longed for the
fresh, fragrant tea; she was soothed by the kind, listening faces.
Suddenly they drew away; they weren't listening any more. John had come
into the room.

It flashed on her that all these people thought that John was her lover,
her lover in the way they understood love. They were looking at him as if
they hated him. But John's face was quiet and composed and somehow
triumphant; it held itself up against all the hostile faces; it fronted
McClane and his men as their equal; it was the face of a man who has
satisfied a lust. His whole body had a look of assurance and
accomplishment, as if his cruelty had given him power.

And with it all he kept his dreadful beauty. It hurt her to look at him.

She rose, leaving her tea untasted, and went out of the room. She
couldn't sit there with him. She had given him up. Her horror of him was
pure, absolute. It would never return on itself to know pity or remorse.

XIII

And the next day, as if nothing had happened, he was excited and eager to
set out. He could sleep off his funk in the night, like drink, and get up
in the morning as if it had never been. He was more immune from memory
than any drunkard. He woke to his romance as a child wakes to the renewed
wonder of the world. It was so real to him that, however hardly you
judged him, you couldn't think of him as a humbug or a hypocrite.... No.
He was not that. He was not that. His mind truly lived in a glorious
state for which none of his disgraceful deeds were ever done. It created
a sort of innocence for him. She could forgive him (even after
yesterday), she could almost believe in him again when she saw him coming
down the hall to the ambulance with his head raised and his eyes shining,
gallant and keen.

They were to go to Berlaere. Trixie Rankin had gone on before them with
Gurney, McClane's best chauffeur. McClane and Sutton were at Melle.

They had not been to Berlaere since that day, the first time they had
gone out together. That time at least had been perfect; it remained
secure; nothing could ever spoil it; she could remember the delight of
it, their strange communion of ecstasy, without doubt, without misgiving.
You could never forget. It might have been better if you could, instead
of knowing that it would exist in you forever, to torment you by its
unlikeness to