She did not reply. His voice was most strangely grave for an observation so trite; he might have been speaking some deeply meditated thing, profound, heavy with meaning, charged with fate. Fatuous! It was extraordinary that there was not an action of his but aroused her animosity. This vibrant gravity of tone--an organ used for a jig, just as his gifts were used for his Laetitia moon-calfings--caused newly a disturbance within her against him. She would have liked to whistle or in some equal way to express indifference to his presence. They were at the gate and he stooped to the latch and appeared to have some trouble with it. “Sturgiss has been telling me what a wonderful person you are.” Again that immense gravity of tone. She was astonished at the sudden surge of her animosity that it caused within her. She had desired to express indifference. She desired now to assail. She made a sneer of her voice. “I should have thought you had ears for the wonder of no one but Laetitia.” “Why do you say that?” She felt her lip curl with her malevolence. “To see you raise your eyes and hear you breathe ‘Ah, Laetitia!’” He opened the gate and she passed out, tingling. It astounded her to find herself a hundred yards gone from the house, nay, now upon the bus a mile and more away, recalling it, trembling and with her breath quickened. It was as if she had been engaged in a contest of wills, very fierce; nay, in a contest physical, a wrestling. She had not known, she told herself, that it was possible to hate so. That man! These men! She put her eye upon the bus driver, strapped on his perch so near to her that she could have touched him, and absurdly in her repugnance of his sex hated him and shrank farther away from him. It was enormously, sickeningly real to her, her repugnance. Even on detached consideration of her ridiculous shrinking from the bus driver she could not have laughed at it. People who had an uncontrollable antipathy to cats did not laugh at the grotesque puerilities to which it carried them. Nor she at her antipathy. “Of course they’re beasts.” Yes, the right word! It was the beastliness of sex that bottomed her loathing. She could not have laughed; but she could and did with a conscious intention of her will put that intruder on her animation finally out of her mind. This very joyous uplifting of her spirit, was it not because, in this world dominated by men, based for its fundamental principle upon play of sex as commerce is based upon the principle of barter, she was assured of position, of privilege, and of power that raised her independent of such conventions and such laws? She was her own! All her proud joys, her glad imaginings, her delighted hopes, arose amain and anew, tuned to this cumulative paean as a nourish of trumpets at the climax of a proclamation. She was intoxicated on her happiness.