the pleasantest body you'd meet in a day on a horse.
She was not like Meta Beggs. He had never seen
any other like the latter. Lettice had said that she
would fool him all over the mountain... but not
him, not Gordon Makimmon, he thought complacently.

He was well versed in the ways of women; he
would not go a step that he did not intend, understand.
This business of Paris, for example: he
might tell Meta Beggs that he'd go, and then, at --
say, Norfolk, he would change his mind. Anyhow
that was a plan worth considering. He recalled the
school-teacher's level, penetrating gaze; she was as
smart as Lettice had divined; he would have difficulty
in fooling her. He felt obscurely that any step
taken with her would prove irrevocable.

Lettice kept at him and at him; after the baby
arrived it would be no better; there would be others;
he regarded a succession of such periods, a succession
of babies, with marked disfavor. He had been
detached for so long from the restraints of commonplace,
reputable relationships that they grew increasingly
irksome, they chafed the old, established freedom
of morals and action. Meta Beggs blew into
fresh flame the embers of dying years. And yet, as
he had told her by the stream, an involuntary lassitude,
a new stiffness, had fallen upon his desire.
Although his marriage was burdensome it was an

[[237]]

p236 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p237w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p238

v?