She answered, "No thanks. . . ." Looking at him across the table, she ended, as though this were her final comment on a long unspoken conversation between them.
"Yes, Henry, I know—but there are two ways of falling in love, one worshipping so that you're on your knees, the other protecting so that your arm goes round—I know he's not perfect—I know it better every day—but he wants some one like me. He says he does, and I know it's true. You'd have liked me," she said almost fiercely, turning upon him, "to have married some one like Peter."
"Yes, I would. I'd have loved you to marry Peter—if he hadn't been married already."
They went out into the street, which was shining with long lines of colour after a sudden scatter of rain.
She kissed him, ran and caught an omnibus, waved to him from the steps, and was gone.
He went off to Peter Street.
He was once more in the pink-lit, heavily-curtained room with its smell of patchouli and stale bread-crumbs, and once again he was at the opposite end of the table from Mrs. Tenssen trying to engage her in pleasant conversation.
He realized at once to-day that their relationship had taken a further step towards hostility. She was showing him a new manifestation. When he came in she was seated dressed to go out, hurriedly eating a strange-looking meal that was here paper-bags and there sardines. She was eating this hurriedly and with a certain greed, plumping her thumb on to crumbs that had escaped to the table and then licking her fingers. Her appearance also to-day was strange: she was dressed entirely in heavy and rather shabby black, and her face was so thickly powdered and her lips so violently rouged that she seemed to be wearing a mask. Out of this mask her eyes flashed vindictively, greedily and violently, as though she wished with all her heart to curse God and the universe but had no time because she was hungry and food would not wait. Another thing to-day Henry noticed: on other occasions when he had come in she had taken the trouble to force an exaggerated gentility, a refinement and elegance that was none the less false for wearing a show of geniality. To-day there was no effort at manners: instead she gave one glance at Henry and then lifted up her saucer and drank from it with long thirsty gurgles. He always felt when he saw her the same uncanny fear of her, as though she had some power over him by which with a few muttered words and a baleful glance she could turn him into a rat or a toad and then squash him under her large flat foot. She was of the world of magic, of unreality if you like to believe only in what you see with your eyes. She was real enough to eat sardines, though, and crunch their little bones with her teeth and then wipe her oily fingers on one of the paper-bags, after which she drank the rest of her tea, and then, sitting back in her chair, surveyed Henry, sucking at her teeth as she did so.