nothing, she had known nothing, she had no conception of anything.  I ask myself whether she were sure that anything else existed.  What notions she may have formed of the outside world is to me inconceivable:  all that she knew of its inhabitants were a betrayed woman and a sinister pantaloon.  Her lover also came to her from there, gifted with irresistible seductions; but what would become of her if he should return to these inconceivable regions that seemed always to claim back their own?  Her mother had warned her of this with tears, before she died . . .

’She had caught hold of my arm firmly, and as soon as I had stopped she had withdrawn her hand in haste.  She was audacious and shrinking.  She feared nothing, but she was checked by the profound incertitude and the extreme strangeness—­a brave person groping in the dark.  I belonged to this Unknown that might claim Jim for its own at any moment.  I was, as it were, in the secret of its nature and of its intentions—­the confidant of a threatening mystery—­armed with its power perhaps!  I believe she supposed I could with a word whisk Jim away out of her very arms; it is my sober conviction she went through agonies of apprehension during my long talks with Jim; through a real and intolerable anguish that might have conceivably driven her into plotting my murder, had the fierceness of her soul been equal to the tremendous situation it had created.  This is my impression, and it is all I can give you:  the whole thing dawned gradually upon me, and as it got clearer and clearer I was overwhelmed by a slow incredulous amazement.  She made me believe her, but there is no word that on my lips could render the effect of the headlong and vehement whisper, of the soft, passionate tones, of the sudden breathless pause and the appealing movement of the white arms extended swiftly.  They fell; the ghostly figure swayed like a slender tree in the wind, the pale oval of the face drooped; it was impossible to distinguish her features, the darkness of the eyes was unfathomable; two wide sleeves uprose in the dark like unfolding wings, and she stood silent, holding her head in her hands.’

CHAPTER 33

’I was immensely touched:  her youth, her ignorance, her pretty beauty, which had the simple charm and the delicate vigour of a wild-flower, her pathetic pleading, her helplessness, appealed to me with almost the strength of her own unreasonable and natural fear.  She feared the unknown as we all do, and her ignorance made the unknown infinitely vast.  I stood for it, for myself, for you fellows, for all the world that neither cared for Jim nor needed him in the least.  I would have been ready enough to answer for the indifference of the teeming earth but for the reflection that he too belonged to this mysterious unknown of her fears, and that, however much I stood for, I did not stand for him.  This made me hesitate.  A murmur of hopeless pain unsealed my lips.  I began by protesting that I at least had come with no intention to take Jim away.