She brought her hands together with a happy movement that at the last instant she checked.  But indeed she was very glad.  For nowadays if anybody was unkind, and on Saturday nights people were tired and busy and altogether disposed to be unkind, she immediately noted it as fresh evidence that there did indeed exist that human conspiracy of malevolence in which the sudden unprovoked unceasing cruelty of Mr. Philip had made her believe.  But if the client from Rio were with her, things would not happen perversely and she would not think dark thoughts.  “That’ll be fine.  You’ll make a grand jumentum.”

“Ju—?”

“Jumentum, jumenti, neuter, second.  A beast of burden.  It’s a word that Caesar was much addicted to.”

When she came in again from the hall he saw with delight that she had put on her hat and coat in the dark, and, though she went to the mantelpiece, it was not to revise the rough draft of her dressing at the glass, but to fish some money out of a ginger-jar.  She brought the coins over to the table and began to arrange them in little heaps, evidently making some calculation concerning the domestic finance, while her face assumed a curious expression of contemptuous thrift.  It was as if she was making her reckoning with scrupulous accuracy and at the same time ridiculing her own penury and promising herself that there would come a time when she should make calculations concerning the treasures of emperors.  She was deluding herself with dreams of the time when she should have crowned herself queen or made herself the hidden tyrant-saviour of an industry.  He detested her ambition:  he felt it to be a kind of spiritual adultery; he moved his clenched hand forward on the table till it almost touched her money.  Immediately she ceased to add, slowly her gaze travelled from his fingers to his face, and she smiled a disturbed smile that expressed at first the greeting that one beautiful animal gives to another, and then poetic wonder at his beauty, and then happiness because they liked each other so, and at last it became a sheer grimace of courage because the happiness was turning into a slight physical misery because there was something she ought to do or say, and she did not know what it was.  And he was smiling too, because he perfectly knew what she did not.

One of the candles had burnt to its socket, and at its guttering arms of shadow seemed to whirl about them, and at its death the darkness seemed to bend forward from the corners of the room and press them closer to each other.  Very soon she would be in his arms, and there would be an exquisite, exciting contrast between the rough texture of the coat that his hands would grasp and the smooth skin that his lips would meet.  But there would not.  The passion that possessed him was so strong that it killed sensation.  He desired her body ardently, but only because it was inhabited by her soul, for their flesh had become unreal.  He felt an exaltation, an