"Let me in," she said. "You will, won't you?" "I can't," he whispered. "You know that as well as I do." Her eyes looked up sideways from their cowering. They were surprised, bewildered, incredulous. "But I'm soaked through. I'm wet to me skin." She was on the threshold. She had her hand to the door. He could see her leaning forward a little, ready to fling her body upon the door if he tried, brutally, to shut it in her face. It was as if she actually thought that he would try. He knew then that he was not going to shut the door. "Come in out of the rain. And for God's sake don't make a noise." "I'm not making a noise. I didn't even ring the bell." He drew back before her as she came in, creeping softly in a pitiful submission. Though the passage was lighted from the street through the wide-open door, she went as if feeling her way along it, with a hand on the wall. Ransome turned. He had no desire to look at her. He struck a match and lit the gas, raised it to the full flame, and then, though he had no desire to look at her, he looked. He stared rather. Outside in the half darkness he had known her, as if she stirred in him some sense, subtler or grosser than mere sight. Now, in the full light of the hanging lamp, he did not know her. He might have passed her in the street a score of times without recognizing this woman who had been his wife; though he would have stared at her, as indeed he would have been bound to stare. It was not only that her body was different, that her figure was taller, slenderer, and more sinuous than he had ever seen it, or that her face was different, fined down to the last expression of its beauty, changed, physically, with a difference that seemed to him absolute and supreme. It was that this strange dissimilarity, if he could have analyzed it, would have struck him as amounting to a difference of soul. Or rather, it was as if Violet's face had never given up her soul's secret until now; never until now had it so much as hinted that Violet had any soul at all. The comparative fineness and sharpness of outline might have reminded him of his wife as she had looked when she came out of her torture after the birth of her first child, but that no implacable resentment and no revolt was there. It was plainly to be seen (nor did Ransome altogether miss it) that here were a body and a soul that had suffered to extremity, and were now utterly beaten, utterly submissive.