She felt that Darrow was looking at her and reading her thoughts, and the colour flew to her face. “Yes: it was when I heard you were coming that I told him. I wanted him to feel as I felt ... it seemed too unkind to make him wait!” Her hand was in his, and his arm rested for a moment on her shoulder. “It WOULD have been too unkind to make him wait.” They moved side by side toward the stairs. Through the haze of bliss enveloping her, Owen’s affairs seemed curiously unimportant and remote. Nothing really mattered but this torrent of light in her veins. She put her foot on the lowest step, saying: “It’s nearly luncheon time--I must take off my hat...” and as she started up the stairs Darrow stood below in the hall and watched her. But the distance between them did not make him seem less near: it was as if his thoughts moved with her and touched her like endearing hands. In her bedroom she shut the door and stood still, looking about her in a fit of dreamy wonder. Her feelings were unlike any she had ever known: richer, deeper, more complete. For the first time everything in her, from head to foot, seemed to be feeding the same full current of sensation. She took off her hat and went to the dressing-table to smooth her hair. The pressure of the hat had flattened the dark strands on her forehead; her face was paler than usual, with shadows about the eyes. She felt a pang of regret for the wasted years. “If I look like this today,” she said to herself, “what will he think of me when I’m ill or worried?” She began to run her fingers through her hair, rejoicing in its thickness; then she desisted and sat still, resting her chin on her hands. “I want him to see me as I am,” she thought. Deeper than the deepest fibre of her vanity was the triumphant sense that AS SHE WAS, with her flattened hair, her tired pallor, her thin sleeves a little tumbled by the weight of her jacket, he would like her even better, feel her nearer, dearer, more desirable, than in all the splendours she might put on for him. In the light of this discovery she studied her face with a new intentness, seeing its defects as she had never seen them, yet seeing them through a kind of radiance, as though love were a luminous medium into which she had been bodily plunged.