While she waited for the tea to draw she came over to the mirror above the fireplace and began to arrange her hair. The firelight played on her as she stood there, her arms lifted, her head thrown back, half her face in shadow, half flushed in the glow. "Janey, you are the symbol of Love--all light and darkness and disarray. It's cruel of you to stand like that--it's profane. For you're not Love, you're morality." "It's funny, Quentin, but you never can understand my reasons for what I do--it's because they're not poetic enough, I suppose." "You don't seem to have any reasons at all--only a moral sense." He rose and went to sit at the table, resting his chin on his hands. She came behind him and bent over him. "Dear one, I've seen such a lot of unhappy love that I've made up my mind ours shall be different.... I refuse you because I love you too much." Quentin sighed impatiently. "If I did what you ask," continued Janey tremulously, "our love would die." "Nonsense!--how dare you say such things! Why should it die?" "I--I don't know--but I'm sure it would. Oh, Quentin, I know you don't understand my reasons, because I really haven't given them to you properly. They're things I feel more than things I know." She went and sat down opposite him, and began to pour out tea. "Let's talk of something that isn't love." He laughed. "Let's breathe something that isn't air. Everything's love--if we talked about flowers, or books, or animals, or stars, we should be talking about love. Without love even our daily newspapers wouldn't appear." "Then don't let's talk of anything--let's hold our tongues." "Very well, Janey." He smiled at the simplicity of the woman who thought she could silence love by holding her tongue. For some minutes they sat opposite each other, swallowing scalding tea, crumbling cake upon their plates. Their first meal together, on which they had both set such store, had become an ordeal of mistrust and silence. The sunset was now ruddy on the woods, and the sky became full of little burning wisps of cloud, like brands flung out of the west. They hurried over the sky, and dropped behind a grass-grown hill in the east, crowding after one another, kindling from flame to scarlet, from scarlet to crimson. The wind came and fluttered again round the house--darkness began to drop into the room. Outside, a rainbow of colours gleamed and flashed in the sunset, as it struck the hammer ponds and the wet flowers of the garden--but the window looked east, and there was nothing but the firelight to wrestle with the shadows that crept from the corners towards the table. Soon the table with the food on it became mysterious, gloomed with shadows and half-lights--then the dimness crept up the bodies of Quentin and Janey, leaving only their white faces staring at each other. They had given up even the pretence to eat--their eyes were burning, and yet washed in tears. Suddenly Janey sprang to her feet. "I must go."