"Now, don't let's say any more about it," said Vanessa, feeling very much relieved. She had the sound instinct that informed her that this man's "clean-mindedness" was revolting, and breathed fast and irregularly at the thought of the danger she imagined she had been in. If he had kissed her with those uneloquent and untrained lips of his, impure in their purity, she would never have forgiven herself. "Look at the moon," she said, as she strode rapidly back to the house. "It is beginning to wane. I wonder if the weather will change with it." And so they reached the terrace,--she feeling that she wanted a wash; he feeling only that he had bungled it, because she was too worldly, too sophisticated to be natural. Meanwhile, however, in another part of the grounds, a very much more subtle, irresistible, and skilful proposal was being pronounced. True, it was being made by a man who desired at all costs, and in good time, to secure his achieved success from threatened assault, and who was therefore a little desperate; but it was also the performance of a creature who knew his subject, who understood its difficulties, and who was not hindered by any of those scruples of ignorance and purity which temper ardour and paralyse daring. For Malster was in the condition in which a man's desire may truly be said to have become a physical ache. A feeling of sick longing held his heart and entrails as in a vise, a sort of cramp of violent tension stiffened all his tissues. On Leonetta his eyes were fastened as if by some powerful magnet. The rest of the world, as also its inhabitants, was obliterated; they seemed nothing more than shadows passing and re-passing,--shadows which, if need be, could be pushed aside, offended, outraged. For what, after all, are shadows? People are mistaken if they imagine that it requires any effort to sacrifice position, power, friends, parents,--aye, even home, nationality, and honour,--when a man is in this condition. For these things are as nothing, beside the all-devouring anguish of so great a desire. They are not sacrificed in such circumstances; they simply do not enter within his purview. If Leonetta had acted wilfully, deliberately, and with her object clearly conceived before she began, she could not have achieved any greater success; for Malster was her abject slave. Jealous of every look or word she vouchsafed to another, hating even the kitten that her rosy well-made fingers clasped, literally ill away from her presence, and thrilled almost painfully by the sound of her voice when she returned, the whole of Brineweald had become for him but a fantastic and hardly material background, to a scene in which his emotions beat out their gigantic throbs like Titans wrestling for freedom. He was not even in a fit state to use an ordinary foot-rule with accuracy.