The drawings, by an unknown artist, were very delicate, indicated by a few lines on what appeared to her a vast page. It humiliated her to recognize that she did not understand the things he was interested in. To admit, even inwardly, that something fine was beyond her awoke in her an arrogance of self-contempt. I'm only fit for one need, she said to herself. Then, aloud, "They are very subtle and wonderful, Dudley. Much too fine, I think, for me to appreciate. I really don't want any tea." And she gazed at him hatefully as though he had hurt her. Feeling herself so much less than he, even in this one thing, made her hard again. She stretched her hands up to him. "Kiss me!" The frankness and kindness were gone out of her eyes. He was startled by the ugly unexpected look, and his own eyes grew sensual and moist as he sank beside her on his knees. She drew his head against her breast and between her palms she could feel his pulses, heavy and labored. Each found at the moment something loathsome in caressing the other; but it was only when they despised each other that their emotions were completely released. * * * * * It was growing dusk. The cold pale day outside became suddenly hectic with color. Through the windows at the back of the room Julia could see the black roof of the factory across the courtyard and the shell-pink stain that came into the sky above it. The heavy masses of buildings were glowing shadows. The room was filled with pearl-colored reflections. Dudley watched her as she lifted her hair in a long coil and pinned it against her head. She glanced at his small highly colored face with its little mustache above the full smiling lips. Again she was ashamed of seeing him so plainly. She wished that she were exalted out of so definite a physical perception of him. "Julia. Julia." He repeated her name ruminatively. "You did come to care for me. What do you feel, Julia? What has this made you feel?" He could not bear the sense of her separateness from him. He was obsessed by curiosity about her and a lustful desire to outrage her mental integrity. He could not bear the feeling that the body which had possessed him so completely yet belonged to itself. His eyes, intimate without tenderness, smiled with a guilty look into hers. She gazed at him as if she wanted to escape. For a moment she wished that they could have disappeared from each other's lives in the instant which culminated their embrace. Their talk made her feel herself grotesque. "I don't know," she said. "How can I say? I don't know." Though he would not admit it to himself, her air of timidity and bewilderment pleased him. "How many lovers have you had, Julia?" She thought, He only asked that to hurt me. She could not answer him. She smiled. Her lips quivered. She looked at her hands.