Of her beauty he grew every minute more aware.  It was not of the conspicuous and conquering kind; it carried no flaming banner of triumphant sex; indeed, it demanded a kindred fineness of perception to discern it, being yet vague with the softness of her youth.  Her hair was mere darkness without colour or flame, her face mere whiteness without a flush; all her colour and her light were, where her soul was, in her mouth and eyes.  These showed more vivid for that toneless setting; they dominated her face.  However he looked at her his gaze was led up to them.  For the long dim lines of her body flowed upwards from her feet like the curves of a slender flame, mingling, aspiring, vanishing; the edges of her features were indistinct as the edges of a flame.  This effect of an upward sweep was repeated in the tilt of her vivid mouth and emphasised by the arch of her eyebrows, giving a faintly interrogative expression to her face.  All this he noticed.  He noticed everything about her, from the fine curling flame-like edges of her mouth and the flawless rim of her ears, to her finger-tips and the slope of her small imperious feet.  He caught every inflection of her voice; without looking at her, he was aware of every turn of her head, every movement of her eyelids; he watched with furtive interest her way of touching and handling things, of rising and sitting, of walking and being still.  It was a new way, unlike Poppy’s way, or Flossie’s way, or the way of any woman he had yet seen.  What struck him most was the intense quiet of her presence; it was this that made his own so noisy and obtrusive.

And yet, she didn’t, she really didn’t appear to notice it.  She might have been unaware that there was any such person as Mr. Savage Keith Rickman in the room.  He wondered how on earth she achieved that serene unconsciousness; he came to the conclusion that it was not her own achievement at all, but the achievement of her race.  Theirs too that something subtly imperious in her bearing, which seemed not so much the attitude of her mind as the way her head was set on her shoulders.  He could not say that she betrayed any sense of his social inferiority, unless it were in a certain courtesy which he gathered to be rather more finished than any she would have shown to a man of her own class.

It was not only finished, it was final.  The thing was so perfect in itself that obviously it could lead no further.  She would say in her exquisite voice, “Would you mind taking these five volumes back to your shelf?” or, “I’m sorry to interrupt you, but can you tell me whether this is the original binding?” Under no circumstances could he imagine himself replying, “I wouldn’t mind taking fifty volumes,” or “I like being interrupted.”  All this was a complete inversion of the rules that Keith Rickman was acquainted with as governing polite intercourse between the sexes, and he found it extremely disconcerting.  It was as if some fine but untransparent veil had been hung between him and her, dividing them more effectually than a barricade.