" After Carey had gone Robin remembered very
well saying to himself that it was strange no man will believe you if you
hint at the truth of your true self. That night he had not known his true
self and Carey had known it. But then, had he loved the shell only? He
could not believe it. He felt bewildered. Even now, as the boat crept
onward through the falling darkness, he felt that he loved Viola, but as
someone who had disappeared or who was dead. This woman whom he had just
left was not Viola. And yet she was. When he was not looking at her and
she spoke to him, the past seemed to take the form of the present. When
she had worn the veil and had touched him all his pulses had leaped. But
when she had touched him with those same hands after the veil had fallen,
there had been frost in his veins. Nothing in his body had responded. The
independence of the flesh appalled him. It had a mind of its own then. It
chose and acted quite apart from the spirit which dwelt in it. It even
defied that spirit. And the eyes? They had become almost a terror to him.
He thought of them as a slave thinks of a cruel master. Were they to
coerce his soul? Were they to force his heart from its allegiance? He had
always been accustomed to think that the spirit was essentially the
governing thing in man, that indestructible, fierce, beautiful flame
which surely outlives death and time. But now he found himself thinking
of the flesh, the corruptible part of man that mingles its dust with the
earth, as dominant over the spirit.
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