"Well, of course," she murmured, "father was Irish; but he was just an expense."
He choked back a laugh. But this sense that she was funny did not blur the romantic quality of his love for her any more than this last manifestation of her funniness spoiled the clear beauty of her face, which now, in this moonlight that painted black shadows under her high cheek-bones, was candid and alert like the face of a narcissus. "I didn't mean to be rude," he repeated. "I didn't think that what I said could possibly touch you. As if I could say anything about you that wasn't...." His voice cracked like a boy's. He felt an agony of tenderness towards her, and a terrifying sense that love was not all delight. It was stripping him of the armour of hardness and self-possession that it had been the business of his adult years to acquire, and it was leaving him the raw and smarting substance, accessible and attractive to pain, that he had not been since he was a boy.
And it was all to no purpose. For nothing seemed more likely than that Ellen should look up at him fixedly and fully assume that expression of wisdom which sometimes intruded into the youth in her eyes; that she should say in a new deep voice, "You are not good enough for me." And of course it would be true, it would be true. Then she would walk on and turn the corner to her home, and he would be left alone among these desolate tall houses, eternally hungry. He could imagine how she would look as she turned the corner, the forward slant of her body, the upward tilt of her head, the awful irrevocable quality of her movements, the ghostlike glamour the moonlight would lay on her as if to warn him that she was as separate from him as though she were dead. He would not be able to pursue her, for there was something about her which would prevent him from ever trying on her those ordinary compulsions which men are accustomed to apply to women; quiet, menacing devotion, or persistent roaring importunities, or those forcible embraces, of which he thought with the disgust he now felt for the sexual processes of everybody in the world except himself and Ellen, which induce the body to betray the reluctant mind. Because he loved her he was obliged, in spite of himself, to acknowledge the sacredness of her will, even though that acknowledgement might frustrate every hope of his love. He greatly disliked that obligation.
