He thought of this old fancy of his, and it seemed
impossible that he should be in love with Mildred
Rogers. Her name was grotesque. He did not
think her pretty; he hated the thinness of her, only
that evening he had noticed how the bones of her chest
stood out in evening-dress; he went over her features
one by one; he did not like her mouth, and the unhealthiness
of her colour vaguely repelled him. She was common.
Her phrases, so bald and few, constantly repeated,
showed the emptiness of her mind; he recalled her
vulgar little laugh at the jokes of the musical comedy;
and he remembered the little finger carefully extended
when she held her glass to her mouth; her manners
like her conversation, were odiously genteel.
He remembered her insolence; sometimes he had felt
inclined to box her ears; and suddenly, he knew not
why, perhaps it was the thought of hitting her or
the recollection of her tiny, beautiful ears, he was
seized by an uprush of emotion. He yearned for
her. He thought of taking her in his arms, the
thin, fragile body, and kissing her pale mouth:
he wanted to pass his fingers down the slightly greenish
cheeks. He wanted her.
He had thought of love as a rapture which seized one
so that all the world seemed spring-like, he had looked
forward to an ecstatic happiness; but this was not
happiness; it was a hunger of the soul, it was a painful
yearning, it was a bitter anguish, he had never known
before. He tried to think when it had first come
to him. He did not know. He only remembered
that each time he had gone into the shop, after the
first two or three times, it had been with a little
feeling in the heart that was pain; and he remembered
that when she spoke to him he felt curiously breathless.
When she left him it was wretchedness, and when she
came to him again it was despair.
He stretched himself in his bed as a dog stretches
himself. He wondered how he was going to endure
that ceaseless aching of his soul.
LVIII
Philip woke early next morning, and his first thought
was of Mildred. It struck him that he might meet
her at Victoria Station and walk with her to the shop.
He shaved quickly, scrambled into his clothes, and
took a bus to the station. He was there by twenty
to eight and watched the incoming trains. Crowds
poured out of them, clerks and shop-people at that
early hour, and thronged up the platform: they
hurried along, sometimes in pairs, here and there
a group of girls, but more often alone. They were
white, most of them, ugly in the early morning, and
they had an abstracted look; the younger ones walked
lightly, as though the cement of the platform were
pleasant to tread, but the others went as though impelled
by a machine: their faces were set in an anxious
frown.
At last Philip saw Mildred, and he went up to her
eagerly.
“Good-morning,” he said. “I
thought I’d come and see how you were after
last night.”
