But she did not hear him.  The news, though it had roused that high pitch of trembling apprehension which it now knew at any mention of the sequel of love, had not shocked her.  In order to feel that quick reaction of physical loathing to the story of an irregular relationship before hearing its details, which is known as being shocked, one must be either not quite innocent and have ugly associations with sex, or have had reason to conceive woman’s life as a market where there are few buyers, and a woman who is willing to live with a lover outside marriage as a merchant who undersells her competitors; and Ellen was innocent and undefeated.  It seemed to her, indeed, just such a story as she might have expected to hear about his birth.  It was natural that to find so wonderful a child one would have to go to the end of the earth.  There appeared before her mind’s eye a very bright and clean picture, perhaps the frontispiece of some forgotten book read in her childhood, which represented a peasant girl clambering on to a ledge half-way up a cliff and holding back a thorny branch to look down on a baby that, clad in a little shirt, lay crowing and kicking in a huge bird’s nest.  She wondered what manner of woman it was that had so recklessly gone forth and found this world’s wonder.  “What is your mother like?  Tell me, what is she like?”

“What is she like?” he repeated stiffly.  He was not quite sure that she was asking in the right spirit, that she was not moved by such curiosity as makes people study the photographs of murdered people in the Sunday papers.  “She is very beautiful....”  But he should not have said that.  Now when he brought Ellen to Marion he would hear her say to herself, as tourists do when they see a Leonardo da Vinci, “Well, that’s not my idea of beauty, I must say!” and he would stop loving her.  But Ellen was saying, “I thought she would be.  You know, Richard, you are quite uncommon-looking.  But tell me, what is she like?” Of course he might have known she was trying to get at the story.  He had better tell her at once, so that he was not vexed by these anglings.  He dragged it out of himself.  “She was young, very young.  My father was the squire of the Essex village that is our home....”  It was useless.  He could not tell her of that tragedy.  How black a tragedy it was!  How, it existing, he could be so crass as to eat and drink and be merry with love?  He turned his face away from Ellen and wished her arm was not in his, yet felt himself bound to go on with his story lest she might make a vulgar reading of the facts and imagine that his mother had given herself to his father without being married for sheer easiness.  “They could not marry because he had a wife.  They loved each other very much.  At least, on her side it was love!  On his ... on his....”

“Ah, hush!” she said.  She gripped his arm and he felt that she was trembling violently.  “Dear, the way you’re speaking of it ... somehow it’s making it happen all over again....”