Charles, with the blank innocence of a self-conscious child, glanced at his wife. "You're right. She is. You dare me to fall in love with her, do you? Think when she gets a good dose of me--" "Sh-h!" Charles eyed the door. "Somebody 'ull hear me? Say, Kate, for a manhandler I've never seen your equal." He jumped up, walked twice around the room, and stopped, gazing down at Catherine with a vacant deliberate amusement. Each felt the other the victor in some stealthy unconfessed combat. "All the spice goes out of forbidden fruit when your wife hands it to you on a gold platter with her compliments. That it?" Charles asked. He was wondering if his presentment about Julia as the great thing in his life had been an illusion. He would accept his wife's joke recklessly but that did not prevent his timidity in regard to himself from returning and influencing his acts. * * * * * Julia sat beside Charles while he drove. Laurence and Mrs. Hurst were on the back seat. Julia listened to what Charles said, but half understanding him. Nothing was real to her but the self from which she wanted to escape, this self which she knew would always deceive her. When the car veered at a corner Charles and she were thrown together so that their shoulders touched. She knew that he leaned toward her to prolong the contact. The warmth of his body gave her no clear consciousness of him, and was a sustained reminder of inscrutable things with which he was not concerned. She despised the humility of his intellect. What attracted her was a kind of primitive cruelty which he tried to hide. She wanted to be consumed by his weakness, to be left nothing of herself. His lovemaking repelled her. She perceived his sentimentality toward womankind. All that he said was false because unrelated to his fundamental impulse which was to take without giving anything equivalent. She had somehow arrived at the conviction that only the things which hurt her were true. Charles's conception of beauty was childish. But she would not be afraid to abandon herself to the things in him he was ashamed of, which he could not control. When he was conquered, as she was, by the desires his intellect sought to evade, he would be caught in actuality. Neither of them could be deceived. She was impatient with Charles's deference to what he considered her finer feelings. There she found herself insulted by the shallowness of his respect.