Then she started cruelly as a shadow crossed her and a figure moved into her sight. It was a man who had come in slippers, unheard. He wore a linen coat. The morning was shattered, the spell vanished away. She was only afraid of being questioned. He came forward. She rose. Then, seeing him, the strength went from her and she sank on the seat again.
He was a young man, military in appearance, growing slightly stout. His black hair was brushed smooth and bright, his moustache was waxed. But there was something rambling in his gait. She looked up, blanched to the lips, and saw his eyes. They were black, and stared without seeing. They were not a man's eyes. He was coming towards her.
He stared at her fixedly, made unconscious salute, and sat down beside her on the seat. He moved on the bench, shifted his feet, saying, in a gentlemanly, military voice:
"I don't disturb you--do I?"
She was mute and helpless. He was scrupulously dressed in dark clothes and a linen coat. She could not move. Seeing his hands, with the ring she knew so well upon the little finger, she felt as if she were going dazed. The whole world was deranged. She sat unavailing. For his hands, her symbols of passionate love, filled her with horror as they rested now on his strong thighs.
"May I smoke?" he asked intimately, almost secretly, his hand going to his pocket.
She could not answer, but it did not matter, he was in another world. She wondered, craving, if he recognized her--if he could recognize her. She sat pale with anguish. But she had to go through it.
"I haven't got any tobacco," he said thoughtfully.
But she paid no heed to his words, only she attended to him. Could he recognize her, or was it all gone? She sat still in a frozen kind of suspense.
"I smoke John Cotton," he said, "and I must economize with it, it is expensive. You know, I'm not very well off while these lawsuits are going on."
"No," she said, and her heart was cold, her soul kept rigid.
He moved, made a loose salute, rose, and went away. She sat motionless. She could see his shape, the shape she had loved, with all her passion: his compact, soldier's head, his fine figure now slackened. And it was not he. It only filled her with horror too difficult to know.
Suddenly he came again, his hand in his jacket pocket.
"Do you mind if I smoke?" he said. "Perhaps I shall be able to see things more clearly."
He sat down beside her again, filling a pipe. She watched his hands with the fine strong fingers. They had always inclined to tremble slightly. It had surprised her, long ago, in such a healthy man. Now they moved inaccurately, and the tobacco hung raggedly out of the pipe.
"I have legal business to attend to. Legal affairs are always so uncertain. I tell my solicitor exactly, precisely what I want, but I can never get it done."
She sat and heard him talking. But it was not he. Yet those were the hands she had kissed, there were the glistening, strange black eyes that she had loved. Yet it was not he. She sat motionless with horror and silence. He dropped his tobacco pouch, and groped for it on the ground. Yet she must wait if he would recognize her. Why could she not go! In a moment he rose.
"I must go at once," he said. "The owl is coming." Then he added confidentially: "His name isn't really the owl, but I call him that. I must go and see if he has come."
She rose too. He stood before her, uncertain. He was a handsome, soldierly fellow, and a lunatic. Her eyes searched him, and searched him, to see if he would recognize her, if she could discover him.
"You don't know me?" she asked, from the terror of her soul, standing alone.
He looked back at her quizzically. She had to bear his eyes. They gleamed on her, but with no intelligence. He was drawing nearer to her.
"Yes, I do know you," he said, fixed, intent, but mad, drawing his face nearer hers. Her horror was too great. The powerful lunatic was coming too near to her.
A man approached, hastening.
"The garden isn't open this morning," he said.
The deranged man stopped and looked at him. The keeper went to the seat and picked up the tobacco pouch left lying there.
"Don't leave your tobacco, sir," he said, taking it to the gentleman in the linen coat.
"I was just asking this lady to stay to lunch," the latter said politely. "She is a friend of mine."
The woman turned and walked swiftly, blindly, between the sunny roses, out of the garden, past the house with the blank, dark windows, through the sea-pebbled courtyard to the street. Hastening and blind, she went forward without hesitating, not knowing whither. Directly she came to the house she went upstairs, took off her hat, and sat down on the bed. It was as if some membrane had been torn in two in her, so that she was not an entity that could think and feel. She sat staring across at the window, where an ivy spray waved slowly up and down in the sea wind. There was some of the uncanny luminousness of the sunlit sea in the air. She sat perfectly still, without any being. She only felt she might be sick, and it might be blood that was loose in her torn entrails. She sat perfectly still and passive.
Originally Posted by Virgil
See it does refer to her chest.
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In "Women In Love" it was when Ursula discovered Birkin's thighs she was entranced or tranfigured - wasn't it? In the current book I am reading the mention of thighs has recently cropped up again...I had to laugh when I noted it. Also, in 'Horse-Dealer's Daughter' thigh touching seems pretty prominent. Hands, I think Lawrence often mentioned. Lawrence, himself, was suppose to have lovely delicate expressive hands. I know he had beautiful handwriting. Personally, I always view a man's hands and think it says something important about him. Janine is a hand girl herself! 
"It's so mysterious, the land of tears." 
