But when she slowly raised her chin he saw with rage that though he had spoilt the colour of her skin with fear, and made her break up the serene pattern of her features with twitching efforts to hold back her tears, he had not been able to destroy the secondary meaning of her face.  It had ceased to be pretty; it no longer offered lovely untroubled surfaces to the lips.  But it still proclaimed that she was indubitably precious as a diamond is indubitably hard; it still calmly declared that if evil had come out of his meeting with her it had been contrived out of innocence by some dark alchemy of his own soul; it still moved him to a madness of unprofitable loyalty and tenderness.  In every way he was defeated.  It seemed now the least of his miseries that he had failed to destroy his father’s persuasion that Ellen was a person of value, for it was so much worse, it opened the door to so long a procession of noble and undesired desires, that he had not been able to destroy.  That same persuasion in himself.  He counted it a fresh grievance against her, and planned to pay it out with cruelty, that she had made him waste all his efforts.  For though he had certainly made her cry, he could not count that any great triumph, since under the shower of her weeping her gaiety was dancing like a draggled elf.  “Och me!” she was saying.  “You want me to give you an explanation?  But when I’ve got an appointment to talk the matter over with the head of the firm, what for would I waste my time talking it over with the junior partner?” And she began to type as if she was playing a jig.

He made a furious movement of the hands.  She thought contemptuously, “The wee thing he is!  Even if he struck me I should not be afraid.  Now, if it were Yaverland, I should be terrified....”  The idea struck through her like a pleasure, until there fell upon her as the completion of a misery that had seemed complete, like the last extreme darkness which falls on a dark night when the last star is found by the clouds, the recollection that Yaverland also was detestable.  Ah, this was a piece of foolishness between Mr. Philip and herself.  In a world where misery was the prevailing climate, where there were men like Yaverland, who could effortlessly deal out pain right and left by simply being themselves, it was so foolish that one who had surely had a natural turn for being nice, who had been so very nice that firelit evening when they had talked secrets, should put himself about to hurt her.  Her eyes followed him imploringly as he went towards the door, and she cried out silently to him, begging him to be kind.  But when he turned and looked over his shoulder she remembered his tyranny, and hardened her piteous gaze into a stare of loathing.  It added to her sense of living in a deep cell of madness, fathoms below the rays of reason, that she had an illusion that in his eyes she saw just that same change from piteousness to loathing.  For of course it could not be so.