The extraordinary loneliness of such a life as hers filled her at times with cynical amusement. How absurd it was, this crowded solitude of London; this selfish, suspicious, careless materialism. No one bothered. More than once she felt whimsically tempted to catch some passing woman by the arm, and to say “Stop and talk to me. I am human, and I have a tongue.” After tea she would often loiter along Regent Street or Oxford Street, looking rather aimlessly into the shops, and studying the faces of the people who passed; but she found that she had to abandon this habit of loitering, for more than once men spoke to her, looking in her face with a look that made her grow cold with a white anger. It was inevitable that she should contrast this London life with the life at Fernhill, and compare all other men with James Canterton. She could not help making the comparison, nor did the comparison, when made, help her to forget. The summer had given her her first great experience, and all this subsequent loneliness intensified the vividness of her memories. She yearned to see Lynette, to feel the child’s warm hands touching her. She longed, too, for Canterton, to be able to look into his steady eyes, to feel his clean strength near her, to realise that she was not alone. Yes, he was clean, while these men who passed her in the streets seemed horrible, greedy and pitiless. They reminded her of the people in Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings, people with grotesque and leering faces, out of whose eyes nameless sins escaped. The flat in Purbeck Street offered her other contrasts after the rain and the wet streets and the spattering mud from the wheels of motor-buses. It was eccentric but unwholesome, luxurious, and effeminate, with suggestions of an extreme culture and an individual idea of beauty. Coming straight from a cheap lunch eaten off a marble-topped table to this muffled, scented room, was like passing from a colliery slum to a warm and scented bath in a Roman villa. Eve noticed that her shoes always seemed muddy, and she laughed over it, and apologised. “I always leave marks on your white carpet.” “You should read Baudelaire in order to realise that a thing that is white is of no value without a few symbolical stains. Supposing I have a glass case put over one of your footprints, so that Adolf shall not wash them all away?” That was just what she disliked about Hugh Massinger. He was for ever twisting what she said into an excuse for insinuating that he found her charming and provocative. He did not play at gallantry like a gentleman. A circuitous cleverness and a natural cowardliness kept him from being audaciously frank. He fawned like a badly bred dog, and she liked his fawnings so little that she began to wonder at last whether this fool was in any way serious.