He said, "I happened to be in Brighton, so I thought I'd just call,
and--I thought I'd just call."
She stared at him, frowning, in the dim diffused light of the street.
"I've been seeing your little boy," he said. "I thought perhaps as I
was here you'd like to know how he was getting on."
"Why," she exclaimed, with seeming bitterness, "you've grown a beard!"
"Yes," he admitted foolishly, apologetically.
"We can't stand here in this wind," she said, angry with the wind, which
was indeed blowing her hair about, and her skirts and her duster.
She did not in words invite him to enter, but she held the door more
widely open and drew back for him to pass. He went in. She closed the
door with a bang and rattle of large old-fashioned latches, locks, and
chains, and the storm was excluded. They were in the dark of the hall.
"Wait till I put my hand on the matches," she said. Then she struck a
match, which revealed a common oil-lamp, with a reservoir of yellow
glass and a paper shade. She raised the chimney and lit the lamp, and
regulated the wick.
Edwin kept silence. The terrible constraint which had half paralysed
him when Janet first mentioned Hilda, seized him again. He stood near
the woman who without a word of explanation or regret had jilted,
outraged, and ruined him ten years before; this was their first meeting
after their kisses in his father's shop. And yet she was not on her
knees, nor in tears, nor stammering an appeal for forgiveness. It was
rather he who was apologetic, who sought excuses. He felt somehow like
a criminal, or at least like one who commits an enormous indiscretion.
The harsh curves of her hair were the same. Her thick eyebrows were the
same. Her blazing glance was the same. Her intensely clear intonation
was the same. But she was a profoundly changed woman. Even in his
extreme perturbation he could be sure of that. As, bending under the
lamp-shade to arrange the wick, she exposed her features to the bright
light, Edwin saw a face marred by anxiety and grief and time, the face
of a mature woman, with no lingering pretension to girlishness. She was
thirty-four, and she looked older than Maggie, and much older than
Janet. She was embittered. Her black dress was shabby and untidy, her
finger-nails irregular, discoloured, and damaged. The aspect of her
pained Edwin acutely. It seemed to him a poignant shame that time and
sorrow and misfortune could not pass over a young girl's face and leave
no mark. When he recalled what she had been, comparing the woman with
the delicious wistful freshness of the girl that lived unaltered in his
memory, he was obliged to clear his throat. The contrast was too
pathetic to be dwelt on. Only with the woman before him did he fully
appreciate the exquisite innocent simplicity of the girl. In the day of
his passion Hilda had not seemed to him very young, very simple, very
wistful. On the contrary she had seemed to have much of the knowledge
and the temper of a woman.
Having at length subjugated the wick, she straightened her back, with a
gesture that he knew, and for one instant she was a girl again.
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