Romney knew in that first hour that he did not challenge her. He felt his youth, his imperfections, the wastes of his past years. All that he had fancied good about those years looked questionable now. If he had known that he was to meet this woman, his life would have been different. He had met no one like her. She accepted his best with ease and without wonder. No man had been able to do that. She tossed a crown over the highest of his mental offerings and added a higher one of her own on his favourite subjects. Yet they were not showing each other their wares. She stimulated him as no one had done before, and as for her part—it was the pleasant passage of an hour.
An Irish woman with an olive skin and dark hair and eyes—slender and not too tall. Her face in profile had the Greek essential of beauty, but with a hardly imaginable delicacy covering the rigour of that austere line of bone structure. She seemed the most conserved creature he had ever met, as if every excellence of life had been known to her from a child—all love and reverence and protection. He suddenly remembered that fury of instinct with which she had kissed the boy Paul in the throat. Something earthy and ample about that, sound and deeply-grounded like a peasant woman's passion.
He wondered again and again what she wanted. It had nothing to do with money or position—Romney was sure of this. Queerly enough the truth did not come to him until later. They dined together humorously in the little cabin of the Sunkiang.... A Burmese tiger had killed her husband.
"I can stand it—if I don't stay in one place too long," she said, looking at the farthest punkah. "It is always with me. If I stay at home, or any one place many weeks, the thoughts seem to pile up so that I cannot breathe. They drive me away—"
She had evidently not found before much understanding of this point—seemed without hope to make herself clear to him.
"The thoughts of it become heavy in any one place," she added, "so that there is no home—"
"I know," Romney said.
She looked at him quickly. Any one might have said it, but Romney spoke as if he had earned the right, and she questioned that.
"The tiger killed my baby, too,—though I was in England—"
She said it apparently with little emotion, but Romney sensed a slow pounding of agony in her breast, like a sea that cannot quiet down.