Rowcliffe had taken up a book and was pretending to read it.  Mary’s hands were busy with her knitting.  Her needles went with a rapid jerk, driven by the vibration of her irritated nerves.  From time to time she glanced at Rowcliffe under her bent brows.  She saw the same blocks of print, a deep block at the top, a short line under it, then a narrower block.  She saw them as vague, meaningless blurs of gray stippled on white.  She saw that Rowcliffe’s eyes never moved from the deep top paragraph on the left-hand page.  She noted the light pressure of his thumbs on the margins.

He wasn’t reading at all; he was only pretending to read.  He had set up his book as a barrier between them, and he was holding on to it for dear life.

Rowcliffe moved irritably under Mary’s eyes.  She lowered them and waited for the silken sound that should have told her that he had turned a page.

And all the time she kept on saying to herself, “He was thinking about Gwenda.  He’s sorry for Alice because of Gwenda, not because of me.  It isn’t my people that he’s good to.”

The thought went round and round in Mary’s mind, troubling its tranquillity.

She knew that something followed from it, but she refused to see it.  Her mind thrust from it the conclusion.  “Then it’s Gwenda that he cares for.”  She said to herself, “After all I’m married to him.”  And as she said it she thrust up her chin in a gesture of assurance and defiance.

In the chair that faced her Rowcliffe shifted his position.  He crossed his legs and the tilted foot kicked out, urged by a hidden savagery.  The clicking of Mary’s needles maddened him.

He glanced at her.  She was knitting a silk tie for his birthday.

She saw the glance.  The fierceness of the small fingers slackened; they knitted off a row or two, then ceased.  Her hands lay quiet in her lap.

She leaned her head against the back of the chair.  Her grieved eyes let down their lids before the smouldering hostility in his.

Her stillness and her shut eyes moved him to compunction.  They appeased him with reminiscence, with suggestion of her smooth and innocent sleep.

He had been thinking of what she had done to him; of how she had lied to him about Gwenda; of the abominable thing that Alice had cried out to him in her agony.  The thought of Mary’s turpitude had consoled him mysteriously.  Instead of putting it from him he had dwelt on it, he had wallowed in it; he had let it soak into him till he was poisoned with it.

For the sting of it and the violence of his own resentment were more tolerable to Rowcliffe than the stale, dull realisation of the fact that Mary bored him.  It had come to that.  He had nothing to say to Mary now that he had married her.  His romantic youth still moved uneasily within him; it found no peace in an armchair, facing Mary.  He dreaded these evenings that he was compelled to spend with her.  He dreaded her speech.  He dreaded her silences ten times more.  They no longer soothed him.  They were pervading, menacing, significant.