Only the fact that she had a naturally strong will, made stronger by youthful years of self-repression, and that he never wished from a woman what she did not want to give, kept her so long not his lover in body as she was in heart and mind.  Looking back, she marvelled at the length of time she had withstood her own heart.  Not her senses; they had not entered into the affair for her at that time.  She actually loved him too well, and was too unawakened physically, to feel the promptings of the pulses.  She felt in him, for him, by him, so intensely it sometimes seemed to her she must be fused with him.  She could have burned away into his being and ceased to have a separate existence if the passionate fusing of the mind could have accomplished it.

For three years she loved and suffered.  She saw him always several times a year, was with him during those times, and he never lied to her about what he felt.  He never told her she was the “only woman in the world for him” and that he could not live without her.  He never mentioned other women to her, except such of his friends as she had met and of those she never knew, except in so far as her own intuition told her, which were only friends, which mingled the give and take of passion with the cooler draught.  On the other hand, he never hid his passion when he felt it for her, and he always showed his affection and care of her when in the pleasant spaces between passion.  He could not but know she was aware that he would be glad if one day she gave him more; meanwhile he did not make her hate herself and him with actions that would have excited without satisfying.  He was the perfect companion, or would have been if she had not loved him.

For three years she never told him that she did; she met his kisses only with frank affection, and though she felt no urge of passion in herself to teach her lips, yet she began to feel that which would have made her more the eager one, and less the kissed, as she always sternly kept herself.  For these three years she did not imagine he lived a chaste existence; there was no reason, with his pagan and quite genuine convictions, why he should.  Fidelity in so far as it meant keeping to one person was to him foolishness.  In so far as it meant loyalty of affection and absolute honesty he was faithful to everyone.

At the end of the three years she had become aware that things were different ... at first she could not say how.  Then she slowly saw that unless she gave more, made herself more to him, she would become less.

He made no demands on her; he would have resented the idea of possessing a woman as much as that of any woman possessing him—­freedom to him was the salt of every dish.  Judy told him sometimes that he made the marriage service of too great importance, just as much as did the advocates of it, though in a different way.  They thought there ought to be no love outside it; he thought there could be none