Roger, left alone with Lucy, resolved he would "do the right thing," clenched his teeth so to speak on the vow. He was the more fiercely determined to act honourably because he felt himself to be fighting against her own weakness of fibre, against her overpowering inclination as well as his own. Her attractiveness for him had greatly increased since the renewal of their comradeship. In the early days of the acquaintance, though her prettiness and virginal charm were appealing, she had the naïveté and insipidity of an inexperienced girl which soon weary a man of the world who tires of the relation between master and pupil. Now she was a married woman; tempered, rendered more subtle by suffering and experience of mankind, who was readier to express her feelings through her eyes and her reticence than by direct speech. She talked less unreflectingly, and the things she said were more due to her own observation and reasoning than second-hand opinions picked up from other people. Ann, in the week in which he had seen the two women together, had been just the right foil to throw up Lucy’s charming femininity, her refinement in dress and appearance and in the tones of her voice. Ann by contrast was an impudent self-assertive virago with the worth at best of a good drudge. After a year and a half’s absence from Europe he made this rediscovery of Lucy, set against a background of Savage Africa—coarse landscapes, jagged rocks, unwieldy trees, bush conflagrations, naked men, wild beasts just kept at bay. (On moonlight nights they could actually descry the grey-white forms of lions and hyenas padding noiselessly round the precincts of their boma.) These violent incongruities made her seem to him a being of exquisite refinement and yet of physical charm. Returning health, intense happiness, the dawning hope of a bright future were dispelling the anæmia and giving back to her face and neck the tinted white of a healthy skin, warmed in tone by a good circulation. There was a sparkle of animation in her violet eyes and a new lustre in her brown gold hair.