remembered how, on this occasion, she had regarded Callendar minutely as he stood, his hands clenching the back of a chair, watching the naked Burmese dancer swaying to the insidious rhythm of tom-tom and flageolet. She remembered how the dancer and the barbaric music had shocked her a little as being wildly out of place in the big stuffy drawing-room. It was music which to her meant very little save that it was mildly exciting. Upon Callendar and his mother it had produced the most astonishing effect. Could it be that in this lay the clue alike to his fascination and to her failure to fathom that obscure thing which people called his soul? Though he had been her husband, even her lover, for a long time, she knew him no better than she had known him on the night of his mother's absurd soirée.
And lying in that preposterous boudoir that had once belonged to the mistress of Wolff, she found herself admitting that slowly and certainly he was gaining complete possession of her imagination. It troubled her because she valued above all else in the world her own aloofness; so long as she did not lose her sense of being a spectator, no one could hurt her, not even her own husband. It troubled her too because she could not be certain whether this new interest had any relation to love or whether it had its roots in a sort of perverse attraction, fundamentally intellectual in quality . . . an attraction which carried an element of the sensual hitherto entirely foreign to her nature. Day after day she found herself smiling over the thought that this sensual attraction should have been a little shocking and was not. In one sense he had overwhelmed her. He was a cruel, a passionate lover. If she had been less intelligent, more innocent, more sentimental, he might have wounded her very soul; but the curse which made romantic love impossible also saved her. Never, for more than a passing moment, had he been able to dissipate her awful awareness.
He had come to her, after all, from Lorna Vale, from Mrs. Sigourney, perhaps even from that American girl (though of this
