The light of the tawny hair mocked the clouded daylight, and when, with the palm of her hand on her forehead, she swept the comb from front to back, it flamed tiger-tawny and ate into my spirit. _Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night...._ In the Upper Fifth at school there was a tall, cold-eyed blood called Dwight-Rankin--I think he died on Gallipoli--who used to sit at the desk just in front of mine. He was a man of the mode, wearing his fair hair plastered from front to back, and his neck was clean and unspotted as a girl’s, and I would spend minutes wondering whether, if one touched the gold down in which his hair ended high above his neck one would feel hair or only skin. The back of her head affected me like that; it was just like Dwight-Rankin’s, only dry, and tiger-tawny. She tore the small comb through the dancing curls on each cheek, so that they trembled like voiceless bells. It is a commonplace about women, as assiduously remarked by brilliant feminine psychologists as women’s “caprice” and “intuition,” that every woman must now and then make a “grimace of distaste” into a looking-glass. But she did not do that, nor need to. She was untouched, unsoiled, impregnable to the grubby, truthful hand of _lex femina_. She was like a tower of beauty in the morning of the world. The outlaw was above the law of afterwards, impervious and imperious. She was beautiful, grave, proud. How beautiful she was now! It was a sort of blasphemy in her to be so beautiful now, to stand in such ordered loveliness, to be neither shameful like a maiden nor shameless like a mondaine, nor show any fussy after-trill of womanhood, any dingy ember of desire. It was a sort of blasphemy in her, as it would be in a peacock to sing gracefully. The silence got on my nerves, and I said something, anything. She looked over her shoulder at me, vaguely. She was the male of the species that is more fearless than mankind. I wondered what she was going to say. “My hat, please,” she said. I appeared to have been holding it in my hand. With her left hand she crushed it on her head and kept her hand on the crown, looking at herself intently in the looking-glass. I was startled at her eyes in the looking-glass. They were cold blue stones, expressionless, caddish as a beast’s. Down, down, with two fingers of her left hand, she pulled the brim of the green hat over her left eyebrow. She said: “I think I must have left my powder in the other room. Do you mind?” I brought her the case of white jade and the box of black onyx. She powdered, without interest. “Good-bye,” she said. Her hand was held out, her eyes were full on mine, naked, expressionless. I felt that they were the heads of the nails under which she had nailed herself. It would be a kindness to let her go quickly, a kindness which she would not have allowed me had I been a woman and she a man.