"Have you any vague conception of what this is for me?" Bulstrode asked.
"Oh, I dare say," she exclaimed, with a kind of petulance, "that I am only thinking of my own bewildering happiness. There," she exclaimed at his face, "I see you have a new weapon: pity. Oh, don't use that against me, and I warn you that everything in the world will crumble if you speak."
Her hands, which he was holding closely, she drew from him and laid them both on his breast and met his eyes full with her own. Her lips were slightly trembling, and she was as white as a winter day. In the moment of silence they passed like this, she seemed to him like some great precious pearl, some priceless rose fragrant, lustrous, made for him, gathered for him, and yet beyond his right. She seemed, above all, the woman, the mate; her glorious sex, her tenderness, her humanness, drew him and dazzled him; and, nevertheless, through his daze and over his desire, he heard with his finest her cry:
"Jimmy, Jimmy, don't speak, don't speak. Ah, if you really love me..."
He really loved her. Rising from where he knelt by her chair, Bulstrode went over, stood a second by the chimneypiece, and then took a few paces up and down the room, came back to her and said the thing the real man says to the woman he really loves:
"I want to make you happy, Mary. I will do whatever you wish me to do."
"Ah, then, go!"
Bulstrode looked wearily about as though of its own accord a door might unclose or a portière lift.
"Go where, pray, at this time of night, or morning?"
"Oh, to The Dials. Ring for a motor; they will take you in again; or go to the rector's."