“Good Lord, child!” he expostulated, coughing and sneezing with exaggerated emphasis, as he propped up his stick in its accustomed corner. “The place will be covered with dust! Why can’t you let things alone? My mother would never have noticed whether the room was brushed or not. It’ll take hours for all this to settle!”

She rested on her great broom and surveyed him through her cloud of sun-illumined dust-motes. Under her gaze Wolf felt his actual body stiffen into a pose of clumsy awkwardness. He experienced a sense of humiliating self-consciousness. He felt like a fool, and a treacherous fool. The gaze she fixed upon him was the kind of gaze the Olympian dawn-goddess might have fixed upon her human lover at the moment when he first betrayed the tricky and shifty mortality of his race. He never altogether forgot that experience. It made a hole in his armour which never, to the end of his life, quite closed up. Henceforth, in all his thoughts of himself, he had to allow for a weak and shaky spot in the very groundwork of his character⁠—a weakness that nothing short of the clairvoyance of a woman could ever have laid bare!