imagine on the part of the tailor or the barber some such treatment of
his appearance as would make him resemble even remotely a man of the
world. His very beauty was the beauty of a grocer, and the finest future
would offer it none too much room consistently to develop. She had
engaged herself in short to the perfection of a type, and almost anything
square and smooth and whole had its weight for a person still conscious
herself of being a mere bruised fragment of wreckage. But it contributed
hugely at present to carry on the two parallel lines of her experience in
the cage and her experience out of it. After keeping quiet for some time
about this opposition she suddenly--one Sunday afternoon on a penny chair
in the Regent's Park--broke, for him, capriciously, bewilderingly, into
an intimation of what it came to. He had naturally pressed more and more
on the point of her again placing herself where he could see her hourly,
and for her to recognise that she had as yet given him no sane reason for
delay he had small need to describe himself as unable to make out what
she was up to. As if, with her absurd bad reasons, she could have begun
to tell him! Sometimes she thought it would be amusing to let him have
them full in the face, for she felt she should die of him unless she once
in a while stupefied him; and sometimes she thought it would be
disgusting and perhaps even fatal. She liked him, however, to think her
silly, for that gave her the margin which at the best she would always
require; and the only difficulty about this was that he hadn't enough
imagination to oblige her. It produced none the less something of the
desired effect--to leave him simply wondering why, over the matter of
their reunion, she didn't yield to his arguments. Then at last, simply
as if by accident and out of mere boredom on a day that was rather flat,
she preposterously produced her own. "Well, wait a bit. Where I am I
still see things." And she talked to him even worse, if possible, than
she had talked to Jordan.