“She is in Paris. She has been in Paris for many days. But she is nothing. Why speak of such people?” “I don’t know. But I hate--” She moved restlessly. Then she got up and went to the fire. He followed her. She could not understand her own jealousy. It humiliated her as she had never been humiliated before. She felt jealous of this man’s absolute freedom, of his past. A sort of rage possessed her when she thought of all the experiences he must certainly have had. She almost hated him for those experiences. She wished she could lay hands on them, tear them out of him, so that he should not have them any longer in memory’s treasury. And yet she knew that, without them, he would probably attract her much less. “Do you care then?” he said. “Care?” “Do you care what I do?” “No, of course not!” “But--you do care!” he said. He said it without any triumph of the male, quite simply, almost as a boy might have said it. “You do care!” he repeated. And very gently, slowly, he put his arm round her, drew her close to him, bent down and gave her a long kiss. For a moment she shut her eyes. She was giving herself up entirely to physical sensation. Fear, thought, everything except bodily feeling, seemed to cease in her entirely at that moment. Some fascination which he possessed, an intense fascination for women, entirely mysterious and inexplicable, a thing rooted in the body, absolutely overpowered her at that moment. It was he who broke the physical spell. He lifted his lips from hers and she heard the words: “I want you to marry me. Will you?” Instantly she was released. A flood of thoughts, doubts, wonderings, flowed through her. She felt terribly startled. Marriage with this man! Marriage with Nicolas Arabian! In all her thoughts of him she had never included the thought of marriage. Yet she had imagined many situations in which he and she played their parts. Wild dreams had come to her in sleepless nights, the dreams that visit women who are awake under fascination. She had lived through romances with him. She had been with him in strange places, had travelled with him in sandy wastes, seen the night come with him in remote corners of the earth, stood with him in great cities, watched the sea waves slipping away with him on the decks of Atlantic liners. All this she had done in imagination with him. But never had she seen herself as his wife. To be the wife of Arabian! He let her go directly he felt the surprise in her body. “Marry you!” she said. “It could not be anything else,” he said, very simply. “Could it?” She flushed as if he had punished her by his respect for her. “But--but we scarcely know each other!” she stammered. “You say that now!” Again she felt rebuked, as if she were lighter than he and as if he were surprised by her lightness. “But we are only--I mean--”