He was untidy; that distressed her. His clothing—she was astonished to see how much there was of it—overflowed from the adjoining dressing-room into her bedroom. She wondered whether any ordinary bride would have liked to see it there, cheek by jowl with her own chiffons. She hated it. She hated his unshaven face in the morning, and his ruffled hair; his presence in the room filled her with an emotion near to repulsion; she hid it behind a valiant smile, but he knew that it was there, and it worried him. Then he told himself that this intensely shy attitude was in keeping with his ideal of her; she would grow out of it; he tried to think that he would not have liked it had it been otherwise. But it hurt him when he kissed her awake one morning, and felt her wince. He was careful never to do that again. He came into her room when she was dressing to go to the Opera; the instinctive clutching of her kimono about her gave him pain. He laughed at her, and took her in his arms; she sighed, like a child that is overwrought, and let him kiss her. Her helplessness made him more gentle still; she was so fragile, so easily frightened.

She did not know Stephen. She realised that now, and thought that the love that survived seeing a man unwashed and unshaven before breakfast must be great indeed. It was queer that she had never, before her marriage, speculated on her possible feelings towards these little, ugly intimacies of their life together. How foolishly innocent she had been! How unfair it was that girls should be tossed into marriage unprepared, and with the rose-veil of innocence still wrapped about them. It meant a rude awakening, a shock, a tearing asunder of that romantic veil. You were jerked into a new life of which you knew nothing, and you were expected to fit into it at once, as though it were not wholly alien to your nature. She was glad that the honeymoon was to be a long one. She would have time to adapt herself, outwardly at least, before she was faced with the ordeal of meeting her people again, and her friends. She dreaded lest they should perceive her true feelings; dreaded her aunt’s tentative questions, or Sarah’s, not tentative at all, but grossly frank.

They went from Paris to Florence. Again she was exhilarated by the change of surroundings, of beauty, and of quaintness. Stephen talked of the Renaissance; she was awed by the knowledge he displayed: she liked to go out with him and hear him talk. He said that she was an inveterate sight-seer because she roamed daily through first this picture gallery and then that. She answered breathlessly, I’ve so longed to see all this!

“You’re happy?” he asked her. The anxiety throbbed in his voice.

“Oh, Stephen!”