While he talked he kept his eyes turned away from her, gazing abstractedly through the window or at a portrait of Mrs.Gay, painted in the first year of her marriage, which hung over the sideboard.

In the mental world which he inhabited all women were fair and fragile and endowed with a quality which he was accustomed to describe as "solace." When occasionally, as in the case of Kesiah, one was thrust upon his notice, to whom by no stretch of the imagination these graces could be attributed, he disposed of the situation by the simple device of gazing above her head.

In his long and intimate acquaintance, he had never looked Kesiah in the face, and he never intended to.

He was perfectly aware that if he were for an instant to forget himself so far as to contemplate her features, he should immediately lose all patience with her.

No woman, he felt, had the right to affront so openly a man's ideal of what the sex should be.