She had been a courtesan.  Did she look like one?  As an individual figure in repose, no!  None could have said that she did.  He had long since learnt that to decide always correctly by appearance, and apart from environment and gesture, whether an unknown woman was or was not a wanton, presented a task beyond the powers of even the completest experience.  But Christine was walking in Piccadilly at night, and he soon perceived that she was discreetly showing the demeanour of a courtesan at her profession—­she who had hated and feared the pavement!  He knew too well the signs—­the waverings, the turns of the head, the variations in speed, the scarcely perceptible hesitations, the unmistakable air of wandering with no definite objective.

Near Dover Street he hastened through the thin, reflecting mire, amid beams of light and illuminated numbers that advanced upon him in both directions thundering or purring, and crossed Piccadilly, and hurried ahead of her, to watch her in safety from the other side of the thoroughfare.  He could hardly see her; she was only a moving shadow; but still he could see her; and in the long stretch of gloom beneath the facade of the Royal Academy he saw the shadow pause in front of a military figure, which by a flank movement avoided the shadow and went resolutely forward.  He lost her in front of the Piccadilly Hotel, and found her again at the corner of Air Street.  She swerved into Air Street and crossed Regent Street; he was following.  In Denman Street, close to Shaftesbury Avenue, she stood still in front of another military figure—­a common soldier as it proved—­who also rebuffed her.  The thing was flagrant.  He halted, and deliberately let her go from his sight.  She vanished into the dark crowds of the Avenue.

In horrible humiliation, in atrocious disgust, he said to himself: 

“Never will I set eyes on her again!  Never!  Never!”

Why was she doing it?  Not for money.  She could only be doing it from the nostalgia of adventurous debauch.  She was the slave of her temperament, as the drunkard is the slave of his thirst.  He had told her that he would be out of town for the week end, on committee business.  He had distinctly told her that she must on no account expect him on the Monday night.  And her temperament had roused itself from the obscene groves of her subconsciousness like a tiger and come up and driven her forth.  How easy for her to escape from la mere Gaston if she chose!  And yet—­would she dare, even at the bidding of the tiger, to introduce a stranger into the flat?  Unnecessary, he reflected.  There were a hundred accommodating dubious interiors between Shaftesbury Avenue and Leicester Square.  He understood; he neither accused nor pardoned; but he was utterly revolted, and wounded not merely in his soul but in the most sensitive part of his soul—­his pride.  He called himself by the worst epithet of opprobrium:  Simpleton!  The bold and sudden stroke had now become the fatuous caprice of a damned fool.  Had he, at his age, been capable of overlooking the elementary axiom:  once a wrong ’un, always a wrong ’un?  Had he believed in reclamation?  He laughed out his disgust ...