“These now,” he had exclaimed, “these are truly beautiful. Look at them and see how the maker understood the working of glass with his heart as well as with his brain. And so in the glass you find the wickedness of his heart proclaimed as well as the goodness, a piece of pure, defiant art. In your drawing you suppress the evil that partly creates you, so there is no good there either, no beauty of life. How did you come by the glasses? They are Irish, I should think?”

Taking them from the mantelpiece, blowing off the studio dust, holding them delicately to the light, Mario had considered them with that intentness of his which was always a wonder to Joanna. He never looked at anything vaguely, as she, confused and absorbed by her own emotions, so constantly did.

He had raised his brows, as she told him how she had bought them of a dealer for a few shillings.

“But I won’t tell him why I got them,” she had said to herself. “That will be a secret always between them and me and Bob.”

Yet immediately something that did not seem herself had made her tell him.

He had watched her face during the brief, hesitating recital, still holding the glasses delicately by their stems, one in either hand, between the forefinger and the thumb. And when she was done, he had raised his hands a very little, and opened his fingers. And the glasses – the lovely wine-glasses that were like river water full of the shimmer of wavelets and criss-cross reeds – had been shattered on the hearth-stone in ten million shivers.

He had offered no apology. “That then is the end of them,” he had said. That was all.

Yes; it might be that she did not love this man, but she exulted in him. She exulted in his certitude, in his power of action. To her he appeared unhampered, and therefore god-like, adorable. And he so gloriously knew what he wanted. He wanted her – Joanna – out of all the world of women. Well, he was to have her. It was decided, and decided by some power quite outside of her will.

VII

From that moment the end was lost sight of in the many exigencies of the means. On the amazing central fact of her marriage Joanna did not let herself dwell, even in her most solitary hours. All her energies, and her awaking powers of management, were thrown into bringing about the wedding with the least possible delay.