matter aside, almost imploringly, growing pale, seeming afraid.
"Don't talk to me of marriage, not yet. How can you? At least, wait!"
She spoke of her sensitiveness. But her sensitiveness was as a mountain to a mist compared with his.
She would tell him her most intimate thoughts, sit with him by dying fire or in gathering twilight, holding herself aloof. If, because he was so different from Peter Kennedy, she did sometimes try her woman's wiles on him, she never moved him to depart from the programme or the principles she herself had laid down.
Another Sunday evening,—it was either the third or fourth of his coming,—sitting in the lamplight, after dinner, in the music room, after a long enervating day of mutual confidences and ever-growing intimacy, she tried to break through his defences. They had been talking of Nietzsche, not of his philosophy, but his life. She had been envying Nietzsche's devoted sister and her opportunities when, suddenly and disingenuously, she startled Gabriel by saying:
"You are not a bit interested in what I am saying, you are thinking of something else all the time."
"Of you … only of you!"
"Of the intellectual me or the physical me? Do I please you to-night?"
