‘It’s all that Lady of Shalott business,’ he said, in his strong abstract voice. He seemed to be charging her before the unseeing air. ‘You’ve got that mirror, your own fixed will, your immortal understanding, your own tight conscious world, and there is nothing beyond it. There, in the mirror, you must have everything. But now you have come to all your conclusions, you want to go back and be like a savage, without knowledge. You want a life of pure sensation and “passion.”‘

He quoted the last word satirically against her. She sat convulsed with fury and violation, speechless, like a stricken pythoness of the Greek oracle.

‘But your passion is a lie,’ he went on violently. ‘It isn’t passion at all, it is your WILL.