“It wouldn’t be fair,” Elizabeth said. “Stephen might want to—to marry again!” It was difficult to say that, horrible to think of it. But it was something that had to be faced.

“H’m! I should like to meet the girl who would marry a divorce Miss Arden remarked.”

That aspect had never struck Elizabeth; she sat very still, thinking.

When Miss Arden had gone she went to her desk, and from the bottom of the drawer in it, pulled out a photograph of Stephen. She stood it on the table and looked at it for a long time. It had lain in the drawer all these months, because she had never dared to look at it. That was rather queer, since she had been able to look upon Wendell’s face, in the flesh. Subconsciously she compared them, and again thought, I must have been mad ever to have preferred Charles to Stephen. His mouth should have warned me. His eyes, too.

She sank her chin into her hand, and still watching the picture, mused on her married life.

She hadn’t appreciated the good in Stephen, the forbearance and the tenderness; she hadn’t tried to understand him. He was clever; in his work she had failed him. She was his wife, and yet she hadn’t allowed him to be intimate with her; she had held herself apart and thought him coarse when he spoke of things which Elizabeth had been taught to consider unmentionable. Things about which she had permitted Wendell to make jokes; Wendell, who was nothing to her. Yet it was Wendell who had taught her to listen to sex-matters without a blush; he had spoken in innuendoes, Stephen would have spoken bluntly. Stephen’s way, of the two, was best.

She hadn’t liked his friends. They were all so different to anyone she had met before. In time, perhaps, she could have learned to tolerate them, only she hadn’t given herself time.

Bridge at Lady Ribblemere’s house. How awful that had been! Yet she hadn’t told Stephen. He had been annoyed at her reticence. He had said, Surely you can say what you really think to me? That was the trouble. She couldn’t. Dimly she felt, If I had told Stephen all about it, it would have been better. All the little things that happened like the Vicar’s wife saying that she feared I was not a conscientious Churchwoman. Stephen would have said, The cheek of the woman! and we’d have laughed, and it wouldn’t have mattered any longer how the Vicar’s wife annoyed me.