To this place, and about this hour, Mary Makebelieve, returning from her solitary lunch, was wont to come. The figure of the massive policeman fascinated her. Surely everything desirable in manhood was concentrated in his tremendous body. What an immense, shattering blow that mighty fist could give! She could imagine it swinging vast as the buffet of an hero, high-thrown and then down irresistibly—a crashing, monumental hand. She delighted in his great, solid head as it swung slowly from side to side, and his calm, proud eye—a governing, compelling, and determined eye. She had never met his glance yet: she withered away before it as a mouse withers and shrinks and falls to its den before a cat’s huge glare. She used to look at him from the kerbstone in front of the chemist’s shop, or on the opposite side of the road, while pretending to wait for a tram; and at the pillar-box beside the optician’s she found time for one furtive twinkle of a glance that shivered to his face and trembled away into the traffic. She did not think he noticed her; but there was nothing he did not notice. His business was noticing: he caught her in his mental policeman’s notebook the very first day she came; he saw her each day beside, and at last looked for her coming and enjoyed her strategy. One day her shy, creeping glance was caught by his; it held her mesmerised for a few seconds; it looked down into her—for a moment the whole world seemed to have become one immense eye—she could scarcely get away from it.
When she remembered again she was standing by the pond in the St. Stephen’s Green Park, with a queer, frightened exaltation lightening through her blood. She did not go home that night by Grafton Street—she did not dare venture within reach of that powerful organism—but went a long way round, and still the way seemed very short.
That night her mother, although very tired, was the more talkative of the two. She offered in exchange for her daughter’s thoughts pennies that only existed in her imagination. Mary Makebelieve professed that it was sleep and not thought obsessed her, and exhibited voucher yawns which were as fictitious as her reply. When they went to bed that night it was a long time before she slept. She lay looking into the deep gloom of the chamber, and scarcely heard the fierce dreams of her mother, who was demanding from a sleep world the things she lacked in the wide-awake one.
V
This is the appearance was on Mary Makebelieve at that time:—She had fair hair, and it was very soft and very thick; when she unwound this it fell, or rather flowed, down to her waist, and when she walked about the room with her hair unloosened it curved beautifully about her head, snuggled into the hollow of her neck, ruffled out broadly again upon her shoulders, and swung into and out of her figure with every motion, surging and shrinking and dancing; the ends of her hair were soft and loose as foam, and it had the colour and shining of pure, light gold. Commonly in the house she wore her hair loose, because her mother liked the appearance of youth imparted by hanging hair, and would often desire her daughter to leave off her outer skirt and walk only in her petticoats to heighten the illusion of girlishness. Her head was shaped very tenderly and softly; it was so small that when her hair was twisted up it seemed much too delicate to bear so great a burden. Her eyes were grey, limpidly tender and shy, drooping under weighty lids, so that they seldom seemed more than half opened, and commonly sought the ground rather than the bolder excursions of straightforwardness; they seldom looked for longer than a glance, climbing and poising and eddying about the person at whom she gazed, and then dived away again; and always when she looked at anyone she smiled a deprecation of her boldness. She had a small white face, very like her mother’s in some ways and at some angles, but the tight beak which was her mother’s nose was absent in Mary; her nose withdrew timidly in the centre, and only snatched a hurried courage to become visible at the tip. It was a nose which seemed to have been snubbed almost out of existence. Her mother loved it because it was so little, and had tried so hard not to be a nose at all. They often stood together before the little glass that had a great crack running drunkenly from the right-hand top corner down to the left-hand bottom corner, and two small arm crosses, one a little above the other, in the centre. When one’s face looked into this glass it often appeared there as four faces with horrible aberrations; an ear might be curving around a lip, or an eye leering strangely in the middle of a chin. But there were ways of looking into the glass which practice had discovered, and usage had long ago dulled
