She stayed at home and sent the children out with the nurse. She hoped that no one else would call, neither Mrs. Hoze nor the Van Attemas. And, staring before her, she reflected for a long, long while. There was so much that she did not understand: properly speaking, she understood nothing. So far as she was concerned, she had fallen in love with him: there was no analysing that; it must simply be accepted. But he, what did he feel, what were his emotions?

Her earlier aversion? Sport: he was fond of sport she remembered.... His visit, which was an impertinence: he seemed now to be wishing to atone for it, not to repeat his call without her permission.... His mystical conversation at the dinner-party.... And Mrs. Hijdrecht....

“How strange he is!” she reflected. “I do not understand him; but I love him, I cannot help it. Love, love: how strange that it should exist! I never realized that it existed! I am no longer myself; I am becoming some one else!... What does he want to see me for?... And how singular: I have been married, I have two children! How singular that I should have two children! I feel as if I had none. And yet I am so fond of my little boys! But the other thing is so beautiful, so bright, so transparent, as if that alone were truth. Perhaps love is the only truth.... It is as if everything in and about me were turning to crystal!”

She looked around her, surprised and troubled that her surroundings should have remained the same: the rosewood furniture, the folds of the curtains, the withered landscape of the Scheveningen Road outside. But it was snowing, silently and softly, with great snow-flakes falling heavily, as though they meant to purify the world. The snow was fresh and new, but yet the snow was not real nature to her, who always saw her distant landscape, like a fata morgana, quivering in pure incandescence of light.

2

He came at four o’clock. She saw him for the first time since the self-revelation which had flashed upon her astounded senses. And when he came she felt the singularly rapturous feeling that in her eyes he was a demigod, that he perfected himself in her imagination, that everything in him was good. Now that he sat there before her, she saw him for the first time and she saw that he was physically beautiful. The strength of his body was exalted into the strength of a young god, broad and yet slender, sinewed as with the marble sinews of a statue; and all this seemed so strange beneath the modernity of his morning coat.

She saw his face completely for the first time. The cut of it was Roman, the head that of a Roman emperor, with its sensual profile, its small, full mouth, living red under the brown gold of his curly moustache. The forehead was low, the hair cut very close, like an enveloping black casque; and over that forehead, with its single furrow, hovered sadness, like a mist of age, strangely contradicting the wanton youthfulness of his mouth and chin. And then his eyes, which she already knew, his eyes of mystery, small and deep-set, with the depth of their pupils, which seemed now to veil themselves and then again to look out.

But the strangest thing was that from all his beauty, from all his being, from all his attitude, as he sat there with his hands folded between his knees, a magnetism emanated, dominating her, drawing her irresistibly towards him, as though she had suddenly, from the first moment of her self-revelation, become his, to serve him in all things. She felt this magnetism attracting her so violently that every power in her melted into listlessness and weakness. A weakness as if he might take her and carry her away, anywhere, wherever he pleased; a weakness as if she no longer possessed her own thoughts, as if she had become nothing, apart from him.

She felt this intensely; and then, then came the very strangest thing of all, as he continued to sit there, at a respectful distance, his eyes looking up to her in reverence, his voice falling in reverential accents. This was the very strangest thing of all that she saw him beneath her, while she felt him above her; that she wished to be his inferior and that he seemed to consider her higher than himself. She did not know how she suddenly came to realize this so intensely, but she did realize it; and it was the first pain that her love gave her.