“You must judge by results.  I always have been—­at least since I decided to lead this sort of life.”

“Why have you never married?” he asked her, a little abruptly.

“We discussed that before, didn’t we?  I suppose because the right man has never asked me.”

“Perhaps,” he ventured, “the right man isn’t able to.”

“Perhaps there isn’t any right man at all—­perhaps there never will be.”

The minutes ticked away.  The room, with its mingled perfumes and pleasant warmth, its manifold associations with her wholesome and orderly life, seemed to have laid a sort of spell upon him.  She was leaning back in her corner of the lounge, her hands hanging over the sides, her eyes fixed upon the burning log.  She herself was so abstracted that he ventured to let his eyes dwell upon her, to trace the outline of her slim but powerful limbs, to admire her long, delicate feet and hands, the strong womanly face, with its kindly mouth and soft, almost affectionate eyes.  Tallente, who for the last ten years had looked upon the other sex as non-existent, crushed into an uninteresting negation for him owing to his wife’s cold and shadowy existence, twice within the last few months found himself pass in a different way under the greatest spell in life.  Nora Miall had provoked his curiosity, had reawakened a dormant sense of sex without attracting it towards herself.  Jane brought to him again, from the first moment he had seen her, that half-wistful recrudescence of the sentiment of his earlier days.  He was amazed to find how once more in her presence that sentiment had taken to itself fire and life, how different a thing it was from those first dreams of her, which had seemed like an echo from the period of his poetry-reading youth.  Of all women in the world she seemed to him now the most desirable.  That she was unattainable he was perfectly willing to admit.  Even then he had not the strength to deny himself the doubtful joys of imagination with regard to her.  He revelled in her proximity because of the pleasure it gave him, heedless or reckless of consequences.  Between them, in vastly different degrees, these two women seemed to have brought him back something of his youth.

The silence became noticeable, led him at last into a certain measure of alarm.

“Lady Jane,” he ventured, “have I said anything to offend you?”

“Of course not,” she answered, looking at him kindly.

“You are very silent.  Are you afraid that I am going to attempt to make love to you?”

She was startled in earnest this time.  She sat up and looked at him disapprovingly.  There was a touch of the old hauteur in her tone.

“How can you be so ridiculous!” she exclaimed.

“Would it be ridiculous of me?”

“Does it occur to you,” she asked, “that I am the sort of person to encourage attentions from a man who is not free to offer them?”

“I had forgotten that,” he admitted, quite frankly.  “Of course, I see the point.  I have a wife, even though of her own choosing she does not count.”