Annette looked up at him for a moment, looked down, and played with her fork.

“No,” she said, “I do not like it.”

“I’ve got her,” thought Soames, “if I want her. But do I want her?” She was graceful, she was pretty⁠—very pretty; she was fresh, she had taste of a kind. His eyes travelled round the little room; but the eyes of his mind went another journey⁠—a half-light, and silvery walls, a satinwood piano, a woman standing against it, reined back as it were from him⁠—a woman with white shoulders that he knew, and dark eyes that he had sought to know, and hair like dull dark amber. And as in an artist who strives for the unrealisable and is ever thirsty, so there rose in him at that moment the thirst of the old passion he had never satisfied.

“Well,” he said calmly, “you’re young. There’s everything before you .”

Annette shook her head.