She let him see her before anyone else, and he had made the most of that ideal occasion when her being was so sensitive that it responded to everything, and so well pleased at having safely borne her son that she saw everything as evidence of creation’s virtue.  He had added stroke to stroke with the modest confused smile with which he entered the room, as if he felt his vast bulk ridiculous in this room of small rosebud patterns; the uneasy laughter with which he disguised his embarrassment when they could find no chair big enough for him; the shy wonder with which he put out his hand and hooded the tiny black head with it, and uncurled the little hand with his obese forefinger; the reticence with which he checked his remark that he had always wanted to have a child of his own.  And he perfected the picture that he desired her to see by the assurance he gave murmurously from the darkness of the open door.  “Get well soon....  You needn’t be afraid of me.  We made a bargain.  I mean to stick to it.”  He had caught the very tune that dogged sincerity plays on the voice’s chords.  She lay happy after he had gone because she and her child had so true a friend.

It was, of course, from no malice against her that he set out to deceive her, but from the natural desire to protect his being from alterations hostile to its quality.  Long after, sitting with Richard in a cafe in Rio de Janeiro, she had looked at the men who were taking the lovely painted women to themselves, and she detected behind the gross mask that the prospect of physical enjoyment set on the faces an expression of harsh spiritual defensiveness; and thenceforward she had understood why Peacey had practised this fraud on her.  He had known, as all men know, that there is a beneficent magic in the relationship between men and women; the evil man, at war with all but himself, cannot but admit that for his supremest pleasure he depends on one other than himself, and by his gratitude to her is tainted with altruism and is no longer single-minded in his war on others.  Such men uphold prostitution because it exorcises sex of that magic.  It is not a device to save sensuality, for love with a stranger is like gulping new spirit, and love with a friend is drinking old wine.  Its purpose is indeed this very imperfection of the embraces that it offers, for they leave the soul as it was.

Peacey, she understood in the light of this discovery, had desired her with a passion that, uncircumvented, would have swept him on to love and a life on which his laboriously acquired technique of villainy would have been wasted, so it had been the problem set his virtuosity to create a situation which would let him fulfil his body’s hunger for her and at the same time kill for ever all possibility of love between them.  She could imagine him seated under the little window in the butler’s pantry, polishing a silver teapot with paste and his own fingers, as old-fashioned butlers do, for he was scrupulous in all matters of craftsmanship; holding his fat face obliquely, so that it seemed as unrelated to anything but space as a riding moon, save when he looked down and smiled to see the blue square of the window and the elm top shine upside down and distorted in the bulbous silver:  thinking his solution out to its perfect issue.