Eve herself was familiar with his mood. Whereas he had noted, marvelled, and rejoiced at the simplicity with which they came together, before that friendly concourse of people, she had stretched out her hands to him with an unthinking gesture of possession. She had kept her counsel during the unpropitious years, with a secrecy beyond the determination of a child; but here, having gained him for her own; having enticed him into the magical country where the standards drew near to her own standards; where she, on the one hand, no less than he upon the other, might fight with the naked weapons of nature for her desires and beliefs--here she walked at home and without surprise in the perfect liberty; that liberty which he accepted with gratitude, but she as a right out of which man elsewhere was cheated. He had always been surprised, on the rare occasions when a hint of her philosophy, a fragment of her creed, had dropped from her lips unawares. From these fragments he had been incapable of reconstructing the whole. He had judged her harshly, too young and too ignorant to query whether the falseness of convention cannot drive those, temperamentally direct and uncontrolled, into the self-defence of a superlative falseness.... He had seen her vanity; he had not seen what he was now, because himself in sympathy, beginning to apprehend, her whole-heartedness that was, in its way, so magnificent. Very, very dimly he apprehended; his apprehension, indeed, limited chiefly to the recognition of a certain correlation in her to the vibrant demands alive in him: he asked from her, weakness to fling his strength into relief; submission to entice his tyranny; yet at the same time, passion to match his passion, and mettle to exalt his conquest in his own eyes; she must be nothing less than the whole grace and rarity of life for his pleasure; flattery, in short, at once subtle and blatant, supreme and meticulous, was what he demanded, and what she was, he knew, so instinctively ready to accord. As she put her hand into his, he felt the current of her pride as definitely as though he had seen a glance of understanding pass between her and the women of the village. He looked up at her, smiling. She had contrived for herself a garment out of some strip of dark red silk, which she had wound round her body after the fashion of an Indian sari; in the opening of that sombre colour her throat gleamed more than usually white, and above her swathed slenderness her lips were red in the pallor of her face, and her waving hair held glints of burnish as the leaves of autumn. She was not inadequate in her anticipation of his unspoken demands: the exploitation of her sensuous delicacy was all for him--for him!