He struck a match and lit the gas, raised it to the full flame, and then, though he had no desire to look at her, he looked. He stared rather.
Outside in the half darkness he had known her, as if she stirred in him some sense, subtler or grosser than mere sight. Now, in the full light of the hanging lamp, he did not know her. He might have passed her in the street a score of times without recognizing this woman who had been his wife; though he would have stared at her, as indeed he would have been bound to stare. It was not only that her body was different, that her figure was taller, slenderer, and more sinuous than he had ever seen it, or that her face was different, fined down to the last expression of its beauty, changed, physically, with a difference that seemed to him absolute and supreme. It was that this strange dissimilarity, if he could have analyzed it, would have struck him as amounting to a difference of soul. Or rather, it was as if Violet's face had never given up her soul's secret until now; never until now had it so much as hinted that Violet had any soul at all. The comparative fineness and sharpness of outline might have reminded him of his wife as she had looked when she came out of her torture after the birth of her first child, but that no implacable resentment and no revolt was there. It was plainly to be seen (nor did Ransome altogether miss it) that here were a body and a soul that had suffered to extremity, and were now utterly beaten, utterly submissive.
This suggestion of frightful things endured was more lamentable by contrast with the shining sleekness, the drenched splendor of her attire. Ransome saw that her clothes helped to build up the impression of her strangeness. Violet was dressed as his wife, at the most frenzied height of her extravagance, had never dressed, as even Mercier's wife could not have dressed, nor yet his mistress. The black satin coat and gown that clung to her body like a sheath showed flawless, though they streamed with rain; the lace at her throat, the black velvet hat with the raking plume that had once been yellow, the design and quality of the flat bag slung on her arm were details that belonged (and Ransome knew it) to a world that was not his nor Mercier's either. And as he took them in he conceived from them an abominable suspicion.
His eyes must have conveyed his repulsion, for she spoke as if answering them.
"You mustn't mind my clothes. They're done for."
She looked down, self-pitying, at her poor slippered feet standing in a pool of rain.
"I'm making such a mess of your nice hall."
A little laugh shook in her throat and turned into a fit of coughing. He saw how instantly one hand went to her mouth and pressed there while the other struggled blindly, frantically, with the opening of her bag.
"What is it?"
"My hanky—" She coughed the words out. It, the childish word, moved him to a momentary compassion.