He ran round in front of her, bringing her to a standstill. "You think you will never marry ... with _this_"--his ungloved hands moved gently over the outlines of her shoulders. "Ah--it is most--musical; you do not know." She thrilled to the impersonal acclamation; yet another of his many defiant tributes to her forgotten material self; always lapsing from her mind, never coming to her aid when she was lost in envious admiration of women she could not like. Yet they contained an impossible idea; the idea of a man being consciously attracted and won by universal physiological facts, rather than by individuals themselves.... If Michael only knew, it was this perpetual continental science of his that had helped to kill their relationship. With him there could never be any shared discovery.... She grudged the formal enlightenment he had brought her; filching it from the future. There could never now be a single harmonious development in relation to one person. Unless in relation to him.... For an instant marriage, with him, suggested itself as an accomplished fact. She saw herself married and free of him; set definitely in the bright resounding daylight of marriage ... free of desires ... free to rest and give away to the tides of cheerfulness ringing in confinement within her. She saw the world transformed to its old likeness; and walked alone with it, in her old London, as if awakened from a dream. But her vision was disturbed by the sense and sound of his presence and she knew that her response was not to him.... The necessity of breaking with him invaded her from without, a conviction, coming from the radiance on which her eyes were set, and expanding painlessly within her mind. She recognised with a flush of shame at the continued association of these two separated people, that there was less reality between them now than there had been when they first met. There was none.... She was no longer passionately attached to him, but treacherously since she was hiding it, to someone hidden in the past, or waiting in the future ... or _anyone_; any chance man might be made to apprehend ... so that when his man's limitations appeared, that past would be there to retreat to....