She met Ulick every night at the theatre, and she had him to sit with her in her dressing-room during the entr’actes....  She remembered the pleasure she had taken in these conversations, and the strange, whirling impulse which drew them all the while closer, until they dreaded the touching of their knees.  She had taken him back in the carriage and he had kissed her; she had allowed him to kiss her the other night, and she knew that if she were alone with him again that she would not be able to resist the temptation.  Her thoughts turned a little, and she considered what her life would be if she were to yield to Ulick.  Her life would become a series of subterfuges, and in a flash of thought she saw how, after spending the afternoon with Ulick, she would come home to find Owen waiting for her:  he would take her in his arms, she would have to free herself, and, feeling his breath upon her cheek, save herself somehow from his kiss.  He would suspect and question her.  He would say, “Give me your word of honour that Ulick Dean is not your lover;” and she heard herself pledge her word in a lie, and the lie would have to be repeated again and again.

Until she had met Ulick, she had not seen a man for years whose thoughts ranged above the gross pleasure of the moment, the pleasure of eating, of drinking, of love-making ... and she was growing like those people.  The other night at dinner at the Savoy she had looked round the table at the men’s faces, some seven or eight, varying in age from twenty-four to forty-eight, and she had said to herself, “Not one of these men has done anything worth doing, not one has even tried.”  Looking at the men of twenty-four, she had said to herself, “He will do all the man of forty-eight has done,—­the same dinners, the same women, the same racecourses, the same shooting, the same tireless search after amusement, the same life unlit by any ideal.”  She was no better, Owen was no better.  There was no hope for either of them?  He had surrounded her with his friends, and she thought of the invitations ahead of her.  Her profession of an opera singer chained her to this life....  She felt that a miracle would have to happen to extricate her from the social mire into which she was sinking, sinking.

To give up Ulick would only make matters worse.  He was the plank she clung to in the shipwreck of all her convictions.  She could not tell how or why, but the conviction was overpowering that she could not give him up.  Happen what might happen, she must see him.  If Owen were to go for a sea voyage....  In three or four months she would have acquired that something which he could give her and which was necessary to complete her soul.  She seemed to be quite certain on this point, and she lay back in the brougham lost in vague wonderment.  Her thoughts sank still deeper, and thoughts came to her that had never come before, that she had never dared to think before.  Even if she were not done with Ulick when Owen returned, it seemed to her that she could make them and herself very happy; they both seemed necessary to her happiness, to her fulfilment; and in her dream, for she was not responsible for her thoughts, the enjoyment of this double love seemed to her natural and beautiful....