They were months of mingled wonder and dismay for Ishmael.  He had married a girl who had only one talent, but that was the oldest in the world—­she was a born lover.  She, who in many ways was so startlingly lacking in refinement, had a genius for the little lures, the ways with hand and eye, of voice and gesture, that make of love an art.  In the ordinary intimacies of marriage, the blunting intimacies of daily life, she had no discrimination; Ishmael, had he been inclined to idealise her, would not have been spared the realisation that even as the grosser male she looked unbeautiful at times, needed to send clothes to the wash, and was warned every few weeks, by an unbecoming limpness in her hair, that it was time for soap and water to combat natural greasiness.  She made no attempt to keep up the illusion which, even while it is admitted to be such, yet achieves its object.  She would have thought it silly.  But when it came to the rites of love she was inspired and could not make a false move.  A thousand little ways of her own, cat-like rubs of her sleek head, turns of her limbs, inspirations of withheld kisses and in the same breath approaches that held an eternally child-like quality in their submission—­there was no faint tone of the age-old gamut to which she did not give its keenest value.

The month spent at the genteel resort of Torquay was to Ishmael a fevered medley.  His days were full of distaste—­at her predilections for the young clerks who eyed her on the sea-front, for cheap jewellery and casual friends picked up at the hotel, at the bland superficiality of her mind; and now and again this distaste was shot through with moments of acute fears when he realised, startled to it by some blunt display of the ugly things of life, that to this he must accustom himself for the rest of his days; and that he would grow only too deadly accustomed, to the stifling of other ideals, he foresaw.  These were his days, yet he felt remorseful at his own spirit of criticism, because she thought him so god-like, and in many little womanly ways showed an unselfish consideration that humbled him in his own eyes and exalted her.  Of the nights, even when there was no passion between them, she made such a delight with her childish clinging, her soft nestling against him, that he would hold his breath to listen to her quiet breathing and move a little away as though in sleep, so as to feel her kitten-like, half-unconscious wriggle into the curve of his arm again.  It was sweet at such times to feel such utter dependence upon him as the protective male, and the best in him was stirred to response.  The next morning she might jar again from the hour of getting up in their ugly hotel room, through the expedition with which they would try and beguile the day, to the dinner, at which her conversation was always most noticeably trifling; but he always, to her surprise, let her go to bed alone, and came up much later to find the old magic upon her once more like dew.