Because, the other night she had made me see myself as I really was—­a man, not of an irreproachable rectitude, an immaculate purity (had I ever, had anybody ever really supposed that I was such a man?) but quite deplorably human, and blind—­yes, my dear Viola, blind as any bat—­and vulnerable, so vulnerable that I think you might have spared me, you might have had some pity.

I found myself addressing her like that, in my heart, as I walked up and down, up and down the deck, not looking at her, but acutely aware of her, where she sat in her deck-chair, bundled up in her great khaki motor-coat and in the rugs I had wrapped round her.

I resented the power she had over me to make me aware of her—­at such a time, or at any time, for that matter.  Here was I, a Special Correspondent, going out to the war; and there, on the other side of the Channel, was the war; in the fields of France and of Flanders men were fighting, men were slaughtering each other every day by thousands.  I was a man and I should have been thinking of those men; and here I was, compelled against my conscience and my will to think of this woman.  She had come out with me against my conscience and my will, and against my judgment and my good taste and my honour and my common sense, against everything in me that I set most store by.  I hadn’t meant to take her with me, and she had made me take her.

And when my common sense told me that she hadn’t; that I wasn’t taking her, and that she had as much right to be on the Ostend boat as I had, I still resented her being there.  I still raged as I realized the power she had over me.  She had always had it.  She had had it the first day I ever saw her, when she had walked into my rooms against my orders, half an hour behind the time I had appointed, and had made herself my secretary against my will.  She had had it when she used me as a stalking-horse to draw her brother’s suspicions away from her and Jevons; she had had it when she drew me after her to Belgium, and when I followed her from Bruges to Canterbury at her bidding; she had had it when I married Norah (hadn’t she told me, in the insolence of it, that she had meant that I should marry Norah?).  She had had it, this malign power over me, the other night, and she had it now.  She always would have it.

It wasn’t my fault, I told myself, if she compelled me to look at her, this time, as I passed her deck-chair.

I looked at her, and she sent me a little sad interrogative smile that asked me why I walked the decks thus savagely and alone?  And I paid no attention to her or to her smile.  In the very arrogance of isolation I continued to walk the decks.  I meant her to see that I could be alone and savage if I liked.

And when I looked at her again (she couldn’t have made me this time, for she was unaware of me, lost in some profound meditation of her own), when I looked at her again my anger and my resentment died with a sort of struggle and a pang.