Then she busily lighted the little hall-lamp with his matches, and hurried down, taking the matches, to the kitchen.  After a few moments George followed her; he was obliged to follow her.  She had removed her coat; it lay on the sole chair.  The hat and blouse which she wore seemed very vivid in the kitchen—­vestiges of past glorious episodes in concert-halls and hansoms.  She had lighted the kitchen-lamp and was standing apparently idle.  The alarum-clock on the black mantelpiece ticked noisily.  The cat sat indifferently on the corner of the clean, bare table.  George hesitated in the doorway.  He was extremely excited, because the tremendous fact of what he had done and what she had permitted, with all the implications, had to be explicitly acknowledged between them.  Of course it had to be acknowledged!  They were both fully aware of the thing, she as well as he, but spoken words must authenticate its existence as only spoken words could.

She said, beginning sternly and finishing with a peculiar smile: 

“I do think this business of father and Mrs. Lobley is going rather far.”

And George had a sudden new sense of the purely feminine adroitness of women.  In those words she had clearly conceded that their relations were utterly changed.  Never before had she made even the slightest, most distant reference to the monstrous household actuality, unadmitted and yet patent, of the wooing of Mrs. Lobley the charwoman by her father, the widower of her mother.  If Mr. Haim stayed away from home of an evening, Mrs. Lobley was the siren who deflected him from the straight domestic path.  She knew it; George surmised it; the whole street had its suspicions.  But hitherto Marguerite had given no sign.  She now created George the confidant of her resentment.  And her smile was not an earnest of some indulgence for her father—­her smile was for George alone.

He went boldly up to her, put his arms round her, and kissed her.  She did not kiss.  But she allowed herself to be kissed, and she let her body loose in his embrace.  She looked at him with her eyes nearly upon his, and her eyes glittered with a mysterious burning; he knew that she was content.  That she should be content, that it should please her to let him have the unimaginable experience of holding that thrilled and thrilling body close to his, seemed to him to be a marvellous piece of sheer luck and overwhelming good fortune.  She was so sensuous and yet so serious.  Her gaze stimulated not only love but conscience.  In him ambition was superlatively vigorous.  Nevertheless he felt then as though he had never really known ambition till that moment.  He thought of the new century and of a new life.  He perceived the childishness and folly of his favourite idea that an artist ought to pass through a phase of Don Juanism.  He knew that the task of satisfying the lofty and exacting and unique girl would be immense, and that he could fulfil it, but on the one condition that it monopolized his powers.  Thus he was both modest and proud, anxious and divinely elated.  His mind was the scene of innumerable impulses and sensations over which floated the banner of the male who has won an impassioned allegiance.