But if it
_was_ mine, it would be a little thing compared with what I wanted to
give you and you wouldn't have."
Her hands in her distress had fallen to their old unconscious trick of
stroking and caressing the thing they held, the one thing that he had
given her, that she had not refused. His eyes followed her movements.
She looked up and saw the jealous hunger in them.
She saw too, through his loose thin suit, that the lines of his body
were sharper than ever. His face was more than ever serious and clean
cut; his eyes were more than ever sunk under the shadow of his brows,
darkening their blue. He was refined almost to emaciation. And she saw
other things. As he sat there, with one leg crooked over the other,
his wrists stretched out, his hands clasped, nursing his knee, she
noticed that his cuffs, though clean, were frayed; that his coat was
worn in places; that his boots were patched and broken at the sole. He
changed his attitude suddenly when he became aware of her gaze. She
did not know why she had not noticed these details before, nor why she
noticed them now. Perhaps she would not have seen them but for that
attempt to hide them which revealed their significance. She said to
herself, "He is poor; and yet he has done this." And the love that had
been so long hidden, sheltered and protected by her pity, came forth,
and knew itself as love. And she forgot his greatness and remembered
only those pitiful human things in which he had need of her.
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