imagined he was
expected to say. Beth had never heard him condemn a vice or habit
which she did not afterwards find him practising himself. She used to
wonder if he deceived himself, or was only intent on deceiving her;
but from close observation of him at this period, she became
convinced that, for the time being, he entered into whatever part he
was playing, and hence his extreme plausibility. Beth found herself
studying him continually with a curious sort of impersonal interest;
he was a subject that repelled her, but from which, nevertheless, she
could not tear herself away. His hands in particular, his handsome
white hands, had a horrid sort of fascination for her. She had admired
them while she thought of them as the healing hands of the physician,
bringing hope and health; but now she knew them to be the cruel hands
of the vivisector, associated with torture, from which humanity
instinctively shrinks; and when he touched her, her delicate skin
crisped with a shudder. She used to wonder how he could eat with hands
so polluted, and once, at dessert, when he handed her a piece of
orange in his fingers, she was obliged to leave it on her plate, she
could not swallow it.

After that last scene the days dragged more intolerably than ever; but
happily for Beth there were not many more of them without a break, for
just as it seemed that endurance must end in some desperate act, Mrs.
Kilroy sent her a pressing invitation to go and pay her a long visit
in London; and Beth accepted it, and went with such a sense of relief
as an invalid feels who, after long suffering, finds herself well, and
out in the free fresh air once more.

CHAPTER XLVII

When Beth went to stay with the Kilroys in London, it was a question
whether she might not end by joining the valiant army of those who are
in opposition to everything; but before she had been there a week, she
had practically recovered her balance, and began to look out upon life
once more with dispassionate attention. Her depression when she first
arrived was evident, and the Kilroys were concerned to see her looking
so thin and ill; but, by degrees, she expanded in that genial
atmosphere, and although she said little as a rule, she had begun to
listen and to observe again with her usual vivid interest. She could
not have been better situated for the purpose, for people of all kinds
came to the Kilroys; and in moving among them merely as an onlooker,
she was bound to see