“That won’t do,” he said.  “You deserted me.  In common justice it’s for you....”

He saw her shrug those white shoulders, heard her murmur: 

“Yes.  Why didn’t you divorce me then?  Should I have cared?”

He stopped, and looked at her intently with a sort of curiosity.  What on earth did she do with herself, if she really lived quite alone?  And why had he not divorced her?  The old feeling that she had never understood him, never done him justice, bit him while he stared at her.

“Why couldn’t you have made me a good wife?” he said.

“Yes; it was a crime to marry you.  I have paid for it.  You will find some way perhaps.  You needn’t mind my name, I have none to lose.  Now I think you had better go.”

A sense of defeat—­of being defrauded of his self-justification, and of something else beyond power of explanation to himself, beset Soames like the breath of a cold fog.  Mechanically he reached up, took from the mantel-shelf a little china bowl, reversed it, and said: 

“Lowestoft.  Where did you get this?  I bought its fellow at Jobson’s.”  And, visited by the sudden memory of how, those many years ago, he and she had bought china together, he remained staring at the little bowl, as if it contained all the past.  Her voice roused him.

“Take it.  I don’t want it.”

Soames put it back on the shelf.

“Will you shake hands?” he said.

A faint smile curved her lips.  She held out her hand.  It was cold to his rather feverish touch.  ‘She’s made of ice,’ he thought—­’she was always made of ice!’ But even as that thought darted through him, his senses were assailed by the perfume of her dress and body, as though the warmth within her, which had never been for him, were struggling to show its presence.  And he turned on his heel.  He walked out and away, as if someone with a whip were after him, not even looking for a cab, glad of the empty Embankment and the cold river, and the thick-strewn shadows of the plane-tree leaves—­confused, flurried, sore at heart, and vaguely disturbed, as though he had made some deep mistake whose consequences he could not foresee.  And the fantastic thought suddenly assailed him if instead of, ‘I think you had better go,’ she had said, ’I think you had better stay!’ What should he have felt, what would he have done?  That cursed attraction of her was there for him even now, after all these years of estrangement and bitter thoughts.  It was there, ready to mount to his head at a sign, a touch.  ‘I was a fool to go!’ he muttered.  ‘I’ve advanced nothing.  Who could imagine?  I never thought!’ Memory, flown back to the first years of his marriage, played him torturing tricks.  She had not deserved to keep her beauty—­the beauty he had owned and known so well.  And a kind of bitterness at the tenacity of his own admiration welled up in him.  Most men would have hated the sight of her, as she