custodian of something that had gripped my most intimate instinct, that
she embodied the hope of a possibility, was the careless proprietor of a
physical quality that had turned my head like strong wine. I felt I had
to stick to our acquaintance, flat as it was. Presently we should get
through these irrelevant exterior things, and come to the reality of
love beneath.

I saw her in dreams released, as it were, from herself, beautiful,
worshipful, glowing. And sometimes when we were together, we would come
on silences through sheer lack of matter, and then my eyes would feast
on her, and the silence seemed like the drawing back of a curtain--her
superficial self. Odd, I confess. Odd, particularly, the enormous hold
of certain things about her upon me, a certain slight rounded duskiness
of skin, a certain perfection of modelling in her lips, her brow, a
certain fine flow about the shoulders. She wasn't indeed beautiful
to many people--these things are beyond explaining. She had manifest
defects of form and feature, and they didn't matter at all. Her
complexion was bad, but I don't think it would have mattered if it
had been positively unwholesome. I had extraordinarily limited,
extraordinarily painful, desires. I longed intolerably to kiss her lips.

V

The affair was immensely serious and commanding to me. I don't remember
that in these earlier phases I had any thought of turning back at
all. It was clear to me that she regarded me with an eye entirely
more critical than I had for her, that she didn't like my scholarly
untidiness, my want of even the most commonplace style. "Why do you
wear collars like that?" she said, and sent me in pursuit of gentlemanly
neckwear. I remember when she invited me a little abruptly one day to