And today Jerrold was annoyed with Maisie because of Anne.  If it hadn’t been for Maisie, Anne would have been with him, enjoying a day’s holiday for once.  Really, Maisie might have thought of Anne and Anne’s pleasure.  It wasn’t like her not to think of other people.  Yet he owned that she hadn’t wanted Anne to stay with her.  He could hear her pathetic voice imploring Anne to go “because Jerry won’t like it if you don’t.”  Also he knew that if Anne was determined not to do a thing nothing you could say would make her do it.

He had had time to think about it as he sat in the lounge of the hotel at Oxford waiting for the friends who were to lunch with him.  And suddenly his annoyance had turned to pity.

It was no wonder if Maisie was hysterical.  His life with her was all wrong, all horribly unnatural.  She ought to have had children.  Or he ought never to have married her.  It had been all wrong from the beginning.  Perhaps she had been aware that there was something missing.  Perhaps not.  Maisie had seemed always singularly unaware.  That was because she didn’t care for him.  Perhaps, if he had loved her passionately she would have cared more.  Perhaps not.  Maisie was incurably cold.  She shrank from the slightest gesture of approach; she was afraid of any emotion.  She was one of those unhappy women who are born with an aversion from warm contacts, who cannot give themselves.  What puzzled him was the union of such a temperament with Maisie’s sweetness and her charm He had noticed that other men adored her.  He knew that if it had not been for Anne he might have adored her, too.  And again he wondered whether it would have made any difference to Maisie if he had.

He thought not.  She was happy, as it was, in her gentle, unexcited way.  Happy and at peace.  Giving happiness and peace, if peace were what you wanted.  It was that happiness and peace of Maisie’s that had drawn him to her when he gave Anne up three years ago.

And again he couldn’t understand this combination of hysteria and perfect peace.  He couldn’t understand Maisie.

Perhaps, after all, she had got what she had wanted.  She wouldn’t have been happy and at peace if she had been married to some brute who would have had no pity, who would have insisted on his rights.  Some faithful brute; or some brute no more faithful to her than he, who had been faithful only to Anne.

As he thought of Anne darkness came down over his brain.  His mind struggled through it, looking for the light.

The entrance of his friends cut short his struggling.

ii

Maisie lay on the couch in the library, and Anne sat with her.  Maisie’s eyes had been closed, but now they had opened, and Anne saw them looking at her and smiling.

“You are a darling, Anne; but I wish you’d gone with Jerrold.”

“I don’t.  I wouldn’t have liked it a bit.”

“He would, though.”