Her poise, her air of being caught up, admitted this: she laughed and looked over at Milton. ‘Don’t go,’ said she as, with a keen sense of humiliation on her behalf and an instinct to escape from all this, he was gathering up his papers. ‘Stay and tell us about the Villa – do stay!’

He was to be haunted – during an afternoon in which he avoided her sedulously – by this ineffaceable new impression of her making a free presentation of herself to all comers. Heaven forbid, he thought, she should be ‘charming’! Her lack of ‘charm’ had from the first been distinct to him; it was a quality more than negative; she had a kind of starkness that enforced itself on his judgement as ‘good’, like the starkness of Norman achitecture. It pleased him – he was frank enough to admit this as vanity – to hear her spoken of as ungracious, unforthcoming, frigid, even as repellent. He was accustomed to let himself in alone, as it were, to his large, dark, lofty conception of her with a strong sense, to forbid a possible oppression, of his own singularity as well as of hers. ‘I don’t want her like that,’ he thought angrily as, looking down from his window about three o’clock, he watched her in her noisy setting-out for the tennis-courts with a party of the Lawrences and their friends. ‘That’s not the girl who wouldn’t marry me,’ he thought, and it was his sharpest criticism of her; for it was that passage by the town bench high up in the sunshine which had given him till now his pang of pride in her, his clearest feeling of her being incomplete and so beyond the doom of limitation. She had offered herself as a break in what seemed, as he was growing older, a general closing-down of horizons. ‘She musn’t be like this,’ he said in his desperation, and to hide her clattered the shutters together and turned away. He felt the most profound concern possible for another human being, when it becomes a question no longer of the extent of one’s own possession of them, but, transcending this, of what in their untouchable selves they are.