Page:The Painted Veil - Maugham - 1925.djvu/53

 self-controlled, without laughing. She was too happy to feel unkindly towards him. Except for him, after all, she would never have known Charlie. She had hesitated some time before the final step, not because she did not want to yield to Charlie’s passion, her own was equal to his, but because her upbringing and all the conventions of her life intimidated her. She was amazed afterwards (and the final act was due to accident; neither of them had seen the opportunity till it was face to face with them) to discover that she felt in no way different from what she had before. She had expected that it would cause some, she hardly knew what, fantastic change in her so that she would feel like somebody else; and when she had a chance to look at herself in the glass she was bewildered to see the same woman she had seen the day before.

“Are you angry with me?” he asked her.

“I adore you,” she whispered.

“Don’t you think you were very silly to waste so much time?”

“A perfect fool.”

ER happiness, sometimes almost more than she could bear, renewed her beauty. Just before she married, beginning to lose her first freshness, she bad looked tired and drawn. The uncharitable said that she was going off. But there is all the difference between a girl of twenty-five and a married