He looked at her with the scrutinizing eyes of affection, whose gaze sometimes is so difficult to bear. And she felt that something within her was writhing under his eyes.
“I don’t think you often look happy, Adela. No; it isn’t that. But you look to-day as if you had been going through something which had tried your nerves—some crisis.”
He paused. She remained silent and looked at his hands and then at his eyelids and eyebrows. And there was a terrible coldness in her scrutiny, which she did not show to him, but of which she was painfully aware. His nails were not flat, but were noticeably curved. For a moment the thought in her mind was simply, “Could I live with those nails?” She hated herself for that thought; she despised herself for it; she considered herself almost inhuman and certainly despicable, and she recalled swiftly what Seymour was, the essential beauty and fineness of his character, his truth, his touching faithfulness. And almost simultaneously she thought, “Why do old men get those terribly bushy eyebrows, like thickets?”
“Perhaps I think too much,” she said. “Living alone, one thinks—and thinks. You have so much to do and I so little.”
“Sometimes I think of retiring,” he said.
“From the court?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, but they would never let you!”
“My place could be filled easily enough.”
“Oh, no, it couldn’t.”