Page:The Voyage Out.djvu/217

Rh "You can't conceive how it interests me," he said. Indeed, his cigarette had gone out, and he had to light another.

"Why does it interest you?" she asked.

"Partly because you're a woman," he replied. When he said this, Rachel, who had become oblivious of anything, and had reverted to a childlike state of interest and pleasure, lost her freedom and became self-conscious. She felt herself at once singular and under observation, as she felt with St. John Hirst. She was about to launch into an argument which would have made them both feel bitterly against each other, and to define sensations which had no such importance as words were bound to give them when Hewet led her thoughts in a different direction.

"I've often walked along the streets where people live all in a row, and one house is exactly like another house, and wondered what on earth the women were doing inside," he mused. "Doesn't it make your blood boil?" he asked suddenly turning upon her. "I'm sure if I were a woman I'd blow someone's brains out. But you, I mean—how does it all strike you? Are you happy?"

His determination to know made it seem important that she should answer him with strict accuracy; but instead of reading a plain answer in her mind, ideas of an incongruous nature raced past her. Why did he make these demands on her? Why did he sit so near and keep his eye on her? No, she would not consent to be pinned down by any second person in the whole world. She shifted her position, sighed, and waved her hand almost with a gesture of weariness towards the sea. She was only weary of him and his questions, Hewet divined, not of what she saw out there.

A feeling of extreme depression came over him. It seemed plain that she would never care for one person rather than another; she was evidently indifferent to him; near though he had thought them they were now far apart; and the gesture with which she turned from him had been oddly beautiful.

"I like walking alone, and knowing I don't matter a damn to anybody," she said. "I like the freedom of it—I like…" She did not finish the sentence as if she did not think it worth while.