But she did not like it at all.  For his face wore the rapt and vain expression of a man who is performing some complicated technical process which he knows to be beyond the powers of most other people, and she had a feeling that he was not thinking of her at all.  That was absurd, of course, for he was holding her in his arms, and whispering her name over and over again, and pressing his mouth down on hers, and she told herself that she was being tiresome and pernickety like the worst kind of grown-up, and urged herself to lend him a hand in this business of love-making.  But she could not help noticing that these were the poorest kisses he had ever given her.  Each one was separate, and all were impotent to constrain the mind to thoughts of love; between them she found herself thinking clearly of such irrelevancies as the bare, bright-coloured, inordinate order of the room and the excessive view of tides and flatlands behind the polished window-panes.  The kisses had their beauty, of course, for it was Richard who was giving them, but it was the perishing and trivial beauty of cut flowers, whereas those that he gave her commonly had been strongly and enduringly beautiful like trees.

Always when he took her in his arms and she lifted her mouth to his it was like going into a wood, or, rather, creating a wood.  For at first there was darkness, since one closed one’s eyes when one kissed as when one prayed; and then it seemed as if at each kiss they were being a tree, for their bodies were pressed close together like a tree-trunk, and their trembling, gripping arms were like branches, and their faces where love lived on their lips were like the core of foliage where the birds nest.  She would see springing up in the darkness around her the grove of the trees that their kisses had created:  the silver birches that were their delicate, unclinging kisses; the sturdy elms that were their kisses when they loved robustly and thought of a home together; the white-boled beeches with foliage of green fire that they were when they loved most intensely.  But to-day they did not seem to be making anything; he was simply moving his lips over her skin as a doctor moves his stethoscope over his patient’s chest.  And, like the doctor, he sometimes hurt her.  She hated it when he kissed her throat, and was glad when he thought of something he wanted to say and stopped.

“Next time I go to London,” he said, “I’m going to buy you a jade necklace, or malachite if I can get it.  The green will look so good against your white, white skin.”

“That’s verra kind of you, but the money may as well lie by,” she told him wisely, “for I couldn’t go wearing a green necklace when I’m in mourning.”

“But you won’t be in mourning much longer.”

“Six months in full mourning, six months half.  That’s as it should be for a mother.”

“But what nonsense!” he exclaimed irascibly.  “When you’re a young little thing you ought to be wearing pretty clothes.  It doesn’t do your mother any good, your going about in black.”