Possession

by A.S. Byatt

If he loved the face, which was not kind, it was because it was clear and quick and sharp. He saw, or thought he saw, how those qualities had been disguised or overlaid by more conventional casts of expression—an assumed modesty, an expedient patience, a disdain masking itself as calm. At her worst—oh, he saw her clearly, despite her possession of him—at her worst she would look down and sideways and smile demurely, and this smile would come near a mechanical simper, for it was an untruth, it was a convention, it was her brief constricted acknowledgement of the world’s expectations. He had seen immediately, it seemed to him, what in essence she was, sitting at Crabb Robinson’s breakfast table, listening to men disputing, thinking herself an unobserved observer. Most men, he judged, if they had seen the harshness and fierceness and absolutism, yes, absolutism, of that visage, would have stood back from her. She would have been destined to be loved only by timid weaklings, who would have secretly hoped she would punish or command them, or by simpletons, who supposed her chill look of delicate withdrawal to indicate a kind of female purity, which all desired, in those days, at least ostensibly.