How he hated the quiet of her face!  With what hungry impatience he watched to see it break.  How surely he counted on its disappearance at his touch.  For he had the certainty of his power to kindle her left intact from the last time he had seen her, tinder to his spark, helplessly played upon by his voice.

But now it was as though he had held a torch aloft into the green branches of a living tree.  A twitch of surface agitation on her face and that was all.

And when she spoke, as she did at once, the sound of her voice was strange and alien to him.  With an extreme directness, and with a deep sincerity of accent which, even to his ears, made his own impassioned outcry to her sound inflated and false, she said earnestly, “I don’t believe I can tell you what has happened.  I don’t believe you could understand it.”

He did not believe a word of this, but with his brilliant suppleness of mind he perceived that he was in the wrong key.  She was not, for the moment, to be kindled to flame, she who miraculously was never the same.  Perhaps it was the moment for a thrust of sheer power, straight at the obstacle, for of course he knew the obstacle.

“I know what has happened,” he said, “without your telling me.  Your husband has made a scene, and overborne you, and is trying to force you back into the hen-yard of domestic virtue. . . .”  He changed his manner.  He said in a low, beautiful, persuasive voice, his eyes deeply on her, sure of himself with that sureness that no one had ever resisted, “But you can never do that now, you bird-of-paradise!  You would only . . .”

He was brought up short by a change in her.  This time his words had had the power to move her face from the quiet he hated.  It was suddenly alive with a strong emotion.  But what emotion?  He could not guess at its meaning, nor why she should step quickly away, shaking his hands from her shoulders, and looking at him sadly, her eyebrows drawn up as if in pain.  He hung uncertain, daunted by his inability to read her face, feeling for the first time an instantly dismissed doubt of his mastery over her.

She said very quickly, with the accent and manner of one who, shocked and pitying, tries to save another from going on with an involuntary disclosure in him of something shaming and unworthy.

“No, oh no!  Not that.  Neale has done nothing . . . said nothing . . . except as he always has, to leave me quite free, all free.”

As he was silent for a moment, watchful, not especially moved by her words, which seemed to him unimportant, but alarmed by some special significance which they seemed to have for her, she went on with the single, only note of blame or reproach which was to come into her voice.  “Oh, how could you think that?” she said to him, with a deep quavering disappointment, as though she were ashamed of him.

He knew that he was the cause of the disappointment, although he could not imagine why, and he regretted having made a false move; but he was not deeply concerned by this passage.  He did not see how it could have any importance, or touch what lay at issue between them.  These were all womanish, up-in-the-air passes and parries.  He had only not yet found his opening.