She slipped to the ground and sat at his feet. Woolf liked her in her devoted moods. Like many another unworthy man, adulation gave him peculiar satisfaction. Maggy was rarely flippant now. She loved Woolf with a passion that almost frightened her. It was not a passion of the mind. He dominated her in other ways. She was too transparent to hide how much she cared. She gave too much. It was her pleasure, when she knew he was going to stay several hours with her, to take off his shoes and put on the pumps which with a few other things he kept at the flat. She commenced to unlace his shoes now. Then she dragged his pumps from under the sofa, kissing them first before she put them on his feet. "You funny creature. What makes you do that?" he asked, well enough aware of her reason, but desirous of extracting an expression of it. "Because I adore you. I feel like Mary Magdalene or whoever it was who broke the precious ointment all over her Master’s feet. Oh, yes, I know who it was. But do you think she wouldn’t have done it just the same if He had been an ordinary man? He was _her_ lord. She never thought of Him as everybody’s Lord. That isn’t blasphemy. It’s love." "You don’t know how I love you," she went on ardently. "Men think they know how to love, but they never love as a woman loves. I love you so much that first of all I wish I had been your mother, so that I might have held you in my arms when you were tiny and given you dill water for your tummy aches, and bathed and powdered you.... And next I wish I had been your twin sister to have grown up with you.... And next I wish I had been the first woman in your life.... And next I wish.... Oh, and I’m thankful to be—just yours." She sat up, and went on in rather a tense voice. "I wonder if you’ll ever get tired of me. Could you, Fred?" "Well, I’m not yet." He gave a playful pull at her loosened hair. "And treat me like men treat the A.F.’s in story-books." "What’s an A.F.?" "Abandoned female, you goose. That’s what I am. And when you’ve finished with me will you leave me to starve in a garret while you live in a mansion with a beautiful and good wife? And will I haunt your doorstep and throw vitriol in your belovedest face?" "What nonsense you’re talking, Maggy." "It isn’t all nonsense. It isn’t only in the story-books that women do that. They do it in real life too. I read about a case in the paper not long ago, and the judge asked the girl why she did it. She answered ’Because I love him.’ The silly judge said: ’That’s a funny way of showing love,’ and there was laughter in Court, in brackets. Laughter in Court! I expect it sounded to that girl like laughter in hell. I know what she must have felt. I daresay she lived so long with the man and loved him so much that she felt as good as his wife. Then when he left her, she must have gone mad, poor thing." She got up and stood in front of him, looking very sweet and alluring.