THE WINDOWwhat did he reply to her offer? She actually saidwith an emotion that she seldom let appear, ‘Let mecome with you’; and he laughed. He meant yes orno — either perhaps. But it was not his meaning —it was the odd chuckle he gave, as if he had said,Throw yourself over the cliff if you like, I don't care.He turned on her cheek the heat of love, its horror,its cruelty, its unscrupulosity. It scorched her, andLily, looking at Minta being charming to Mr. Ram-say at the other end of the table, flinched for her ex-posed to those fangs, and was thankful. For at anyrate, she said to herself, catching sight of the saltcellar on the pattern, she need not marry, thankHeaven: she need not undergo that degradation. Shewas saved from that dilution. She would move thetree rather more to the middle.

Such was the complexity of things. For what hap-pened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays,was to be made to feel violently two opposite thingsat the same time; that’s what you feel, was one; that’swhat I feel was the other, and then they fought to-gether in her mind, as now. It is so beautiful, so ex-citing, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it,and offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for abrooch on a beach; also it is the stupidest, the mostbarbaric of human passions, and turns a nice youngman with a profile like a gem (Paul’s was exquisite)into a bully with a crowbar (he was swaggering, hewas insolent) in the Mile End Road. Yet she said toherself, from the dawn of time odes have been sungto love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you askednine people out of ten they would say they wantednothing but this; while the women, judging from her121
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