“It’s all right. Don’t you mind!” She spoke these words with a tenderness that was as gentle as a caress⁠—a caress which might have been given to a disgraced animal that required reassuring; and as she spoke she leaned forward and made a little movement of her hand towards him. It was the faintest of gestures. Her fingers immediately afterwards lay clasped on her lap. But he did not miss the movement, and it pleased him well. Another thing he did not miss was that under any stress of emotion a certain wavering shapelessness in her countenance disappeared. Mouth, nose, cheeks, chin, all these features, chaotic and inchoate when left to themselves, at such moments attained a harmony of expression which approached, if it did not actually reach, the verge of the beautiful.

Wolf brought down his tilted chair upon the floor with a jerk.