Her head was bowed, her face turned from him and shaded by her hair; and with her hands she tended a dying flame.  Her shawl had slipped from her shoulders, and he saw the delicate curve of her body as she knelt; it was overlaid by her hair that fell to her hips in a loose flat braid.  He closed his eyes again, feigning abysmal sleep.  He kept guard over his breath, over his eyelids, lest a tremor should startle her into shame-faced flight.  Yet he knew that she had risen and that her face was set towards him; that she turned from him and then paused in her going; that she looked at the fire again to make sure of its burning, and at him to make sure of his sleep (so intently that she never noticed the white thing which had slipped from her shoulders as she stood upright); that she stooped to draw his coat more closely over him.  He heard the flowing of her gown, and saw without seeing her feet shining as she went from him.

And his desire went after her, and the mere bodiless idea of her became a torment to his body as it had been a joy to his soul.

He took up her shawl which lay there by the hearth and looked at it; he stroked it, unfolded it, spread it out and looked at it again; he held it to his face; its whiteness and its tender texture were as flame to his sight and touch, the scarcely perceptible scent of it pierced him like a delicate pain.  He gathered it up again in a heap and covered it with kisses.  Then, because it made his longing for her insupportable, he flung it back, that innocent little white shawl, as if shaking off her touch and her presence.

He rose to his feet and ramped up and down the room savagely, like a wild animal in a cage.  With every thought of Lucia his torment returned upon him.  He tried to think of the whiteness and the beauty of her soul, and he could think of nothing but the whiteness of her face and the beauty of her bending body.

He sat down, stretched his arms on the table and laid his miserable head upon them, all among the pages of the catalogue raisonne.  He had passed from his agony of desire to an agony of contrition.  He felt that the very vehemence of his longing was an affront to her white unconsciousness Up till now he had not admitted that he was “in love” with Lucia; he was indeed hardly aware of it.  He imagined his feeling for her to be something altogether immaterial and incorruptible.  It now seemed to him that in the last few minutes he had lowered it almost to the level of the emotion inspired by Miss Poppy Grace.  It was not, and it never could be, what it had been three weeks ago.  Why, he could not even recall his sensations of Easter Sunday, that strange renewal of his heart’s virginity his first vague imperfect vision of the dawn of love, his joy when he discerned its tender and mysterious approach.  He knew that it held no rights, or held them only on the most subtle and uncertain tenure, that his soul touched the soul of Lucia Harden by the extreme tips of its wings stretched to the utmost.  Still his passion for her had been, so far, satisfied by that difficult and immaterial relationship.  He was bound to her by an immaterial, intangible link.