When he chooses he will speak, and not before.

“It is very good of you to say so,” he answers quietly, in a cold formal tone, and the girl quivers as if he had struck her.

Now, in his lonely, sleepless nights, the misery on the white face comes back and back to him in the darkness of his room, but then he is blind to it.

In an annoyed mood to begin with, irritated beyond bearing by his own helpless, ignominious position, as he fancies, he has no perception left for his own danger of losing her.

And the man, who had lived till five-and-twenty, desiring real love, and not knowing it, deliberately trampled upon it without recognising what he did.

His words cut the girl terribly.

It seems impossible for the second that she can force herself to speak again to him, but the terrible, irrepressible longing within her nerves her for one more effort.

“Is that all you can tell me?  Do you not care for me at all?”

He looks at her and hesitates.  So modest, so appealing, so timid, and yet so passionate!  Surely this is genuine love for him.  Why thrust it back?  But the thought recurs.  No.  She is rushing him; and he declines to be rushed.  Also a sort of half-embarrassment comes over him, a nervous instinct to put off, ward off a scene in which he will be called upon to demonstrate feelings he may not satisfy.

He laughs slightly, and says: 

“Of course I do!  I like you very much!”

The tones are slighting and contemptuous, enough so to convey the polite warning:  Don’t go any further, and force me to be positively rude to you.

Swayed by his strong physical passion, and blinded by the dogged determination he has to remain master of it, he is absolutely insensible of another’s suffering.

Had the girl had greater experience with men, more hardihood and less modesty; if she could have approached him, and taken his hands and pressed them to her bosom; if she had had the courage to force upon him the mysterious influence of physical contact, Stephen’s control would have melted in the kindled fire.

Words stir the brain, and through the brain, the senses; but with some people it’s a long way round.

Touch stirs the nerves, and its flame runs through the body like a flying pain.

Stephen’s physical nerves were far more sensitive than his brain, and had the girl been a woman of the half-world, or even of the world, she could have succeeded.  But she was a girl; and her modesty and innocence, the chastity of all her mental and physical being, hung like dead weights upon her in the encounter.

His words, his tones, his glance simply paralyze her—­not figuratively, but positively.  Her physical power to move towards him, to make a further appeal to him, is gone.  Speech is dried upon her lips, wiped from them as a handkerchief passed over them might take their moisture.