‘What does it matter what the servants think?’ I said brusquely.

’But it does matter.  He didn’t come home.  He must have slept at a hotel.  Fancy, sleeping at a hotel, and his home waiting for him!  Oh, Carlotta, you’re too young to understand what I feel!  You’re very clever, and you’re very sympathetic; but you can’t see things as I see them.  Wait till you’ve been married fifteen years.  The scandal!  The shame!  And me only too anxious to be a good wife, and to keep our home as it should be, and to help him as much as I can with my stupid brains in his business!’

‘I can understand perfectly,’ I asserted.  ‘I can understand perfectly.’

And I could.  The futility of arguing with Mary, of attempting to free her ever so little from the coils of convention which had always bound her, was only too plainly apparent.  She was—­and naturally, sincerely, instinctively—­the very incarnation and mouthpiece of the conventionality of society, as she cowered there in her grief and her quiet resentment.  But this did not impair the authenticity of her grief and her resentment.  Her grief appealed to me powerfully, and her resentment, almost angelic in its quality, seemed sufficiently justified.  I knew that my own position was in practice untenable, that logic must always be inferior to emotion.  I am intensely proud of my ability to see, then, that no sentiment can be false which is sincere, and that Mary Ispenlove’s attitude towards marriage was exactly as natural, exactly as free from artificiality, as my own.  Can you go outside Nature?  Is not the polity of Londoners in London as much a part of Nature as the polity of bees in a hive?

‘Not a word for fifteen years, and then an explosion like that!’ she murmured, incessantly recurring to the core of her grievance.  ’I did wrong to marry him, I know.  But I did marry him—­I did marry him!  We are husband and wife.  And he goes off and sleeps at a hotel!  Carlotta, I wish I had never been born!  What will people say?  I shall never be able to look anyone in the face again.’

‘He will come back,’ I said again.

‘Do you think so?’

This time she caught at the straw.

‘Yes,’ I said.  ’And you will settle down gradually; and everything will be forgotten.’

I said that because it was the one thing I could say.  I repeat that I had ceased to think of myself.  I had become a spectator.

‘It can never be the same between us again,’ Mary breathed sadly.

At that moment Emmeline Palmer plunged, rather than came, into my bedroom.

‘Oh, Miss Peel—­’ she began, and then stopped, seeing Mrs. Ispenlove by the fireplace, though she knew that Mrs. Ispenlove was with me.

‘Anything wrong?’ I asked, affecting a complete calm.

It was evident that the good creature had lost her head, as she sometimes did, when I gave her too much to copy, or when the unusual occurred in no matter what form.  The excellent Emmeline was one of my mistakes.