“He said, ’Oh, Lord, take ’em off!  Here, let me have a look!’ He swung me round, with his hands on my shoulders, into the light from the hall gas, and I met his look.  ’They might be worse, I suppose, but for goodness’ sake take them off!’ he said; ’you don’t have to wear them, you know!’ I said nothing, but broke away and went down the steps.  He came after me and continued to look in the street.  ’I say, you look just like your mother in them!’ he went on.  That was the cruellest thing he could have said, because he knew my mother ... he only did it because he did not think I really had to wear them, and he thought it would make me leave off.  I told him what the oculist had said, and he said he would call on me again after I was forty.  I pretended to laugh, but I was feeling like death.  Later on I slipped them off, and he had the tact not to say anything when he saw what I had done.  I never wore them again with him, and went over the world unable to see the things he was raving about, and having perpetually to pretend that I did and guess at the right thing to say.  Now—­it doesn’t matter.  I prefer wearing them to having blinding headaches.”

“It was pretty rotten of him to let it make a difference,” said Ishmael.

“No, I understand what he felt so well.  I knew it myself.  There is always something ridiculous about making love to a woman in glasses.  It destroys atmosphere.  If you’re married, and either you’re so one with the man that he really does love you through everything or else is so dull that he doesn’t feel their ugliness, it wouldn’t make a difference.  But I was not married—­he had not the married temperament.  And you must admit that it is impossible to imagine a mistress in glasses....”

“Don’t!” said Ishmael sharply.

“Don’t what?  Did you think I was speaking bitterly?  I wasn’t.  There isn’t a scrap of bitterness in me, I’m thankful to say.  I couldn’t have lived if there had been.  I saw that almost at the beginning, as I did about jealousy.  If you have much to be bitter and jealous about, you can’t be; it would kill you.  It’s only the people who can indulge in a little of it who dare to.  I have not been unhappy for the most part, and I wouldn’t undo it, which is the great thing.  You knew I had given up having times away with him years ago?”

“Yes, I wondered why.”

“The thing had somehow lost something ... what is lost in marriage just the same—­rapture, glow, fragrance....  And in marriage, with luck, something else comes to take its place ... domesticity, which is very sweet to a woman.  Looking after him instead of being looked after—­a deep quiet something.  You and Georgie are getting it.  But in a relation outside marriage you can’t get that.  You can in those extraordinary menages in France where the little mistress is so domesticated and lives with her lover for years, but that would have been as bad to him as marriage.  So I thought