And with her knowledge there came a curious calm.

She no longer watched and worried Rowcliffe.  She knew that no wife ever kept her husband by watching and worrying him.

She was aware of danger and she faced it with restored complacency.

For Mary was a fount of sensual wisdom.  Rowcliffe was ill.  And from his illness she inferred his misery, and from his misery his innocence.

She told herself that nothing had happened, that she knew nothing that she had not known before.  She saw that her mistake had been in showing that she knew it.  That was to admit it, and to admit it was to give it a substance, a shape and color it had never had and was not likely to have.

And Mary, having perceived her blunder, set herself to repair it.

She knew how.  Under all his energy she had discerned in her husband a love of bodily ease, and a capacity for laziness, undeveloped because perpetually frustrated.  Insidiously she had set herself to undermine his energy while she devised continual opportunities for ease.

Rowcliffe remained incurably energetic.  His profession demanded energy.

Still, there were ways by which he could be captured.  He was not so deeply absorbed in his profession as to be indifferent to the arrangements of his home.  He liked and he showed very plainly that he liked, good food and silent service, the shining of glass and silver, white table linen and fragrant sheets for his bed.

With all these things Mary had provided him.

And she had her own magic and her way.

Her way, the way she had caught him, was the way she would keep him.  She had always known her power, even unpracticed.  She had always known by instinct how she could enthrall him when her moment came.  Gwenda had put back the hour; but she had done (and Mary argued that therefore she could do) no more.

Here Mary’s complacency betrayed her.  She had fallen into the error of all innocent and tranquil sensualists.  She trusted to the present.  She had reckoned without Rowcliffe’s future or his past.

And she had done even worse.  By habituating Rowcliffe’s senses to her way, she had produced in him, through sheer satisfaction, that sense of security which is the most dangerous sense of all.

LIV

One week in June Rowcliffe went up to Garthdale two nights running.  He had never done this before and he had had to lie badly about it both to himself and Mary.

He had told himself that the first evening didn’t count.

For he had quarreled with Gwenda the first evening.  Neither of them knew how it had happened or what it was about.  But he had hardly come before he had left her in his anger.

The actual outburst moved her only to laughter, but the memory of it was violent in her nerves, it shook and shattered her.  She had not slept all night and in the morning she woke tired and ill.  And, as if he had known what he had done to her, he came to see her the next evening, to make up.