Page:Possession (1926).pdf/497

 her eye he could not fail to see that she was jeering him. He had not subdued Lilli Barr. She belonged once more to Rebecca and to the world. And in the end it was women who defeated him—women who had always been his obsession, the women who surrounded Ellen—Lily and Hattie and Rebecca, the subtle Sabine and even Thérèse with her gift that made Ellen unpregnably secure. He had not broken her spirit, for he had never possessed her even for a moment; it was her awareness which had baffled him, standing like a wall across his path.

The perverse experiment had failed; there had not even been much pleasure in it. Youth lay behind him. What lay ahead? As he stepped from Lily's door there were lines in the handsome, insolent face which no amount of exercise or massage could ever smooth away. . . . He was growing old. It was as if these women had banded together and, placing Ellen in their midst, now mocked him. . . . Women. . . Women. . . Women. . . One could come to hate them all in the end.

So Rebecca too, in the wholly false supposition that she had come for a brief visit, was given a room that opened off the gallery and so joined all the colony which centered about Ellen in a world founded upon dividends from the black Mills in the Midlands.

And Ellen waited, growing more and more calm as her time approached. She found pleasure in the fantastic spectacle of Lily's house. She was the center of it, and the old intoxication, so familiar to Lilli Barr, began slowly to claim her again. 

HE thing happened on a hot breathless night in September when the shimmer of heat dying away with the fall of evening left the garden cool and dark save for the light that streamed from the windows of the long drawing room and from a single window of the white pavilion. The Eng-