So--motionless, dimly seen--she was like a woman sitting alongside her own life, scrutinising, criticising, watching it live, taking no part in it.

Hilary wondered whether to go in or slip away from his strange visitor.
"Ah! it's you," she said.
Hilary approached her.

For all her mocking of her own charms, this wife of his was strangely graceful.

After nineteen years in which to learn every line of her face and body, every secret of her nature, she still eluded him; that elusiveness, which had begun by being such a charm, had got on his nerves, and extinguished the flame it had once lighted.

He had so often tried to see, and never seen, the essence of her soul.