Rowcliffe himself had become the creature of unalterable habit.

She was conscious now of the normal pulse of time, a steady pulse that beat with a large rhythm, a measure of seven days, from Wednesday to Wednesday.

She filled the days between with reading and walking and parish work.

There had been changes in Garthdale.  Mr. Grierson had got married in one of his bursts of enthusiasm and had gone away.  His place had been taken by Mr. Macey, the strenuous son of a Durlingham grocer.  Mr. Macey had got into the Church by sheer strenuousness and had married, strenuously, a sharp and sallow wife.  Between them they left very little parish work for Gwenda.

She had become a furious reader.  She liked hard stuff that her brain could bite on.  It fell on a book and gutted it, throwing away the trash.  She read all the modern poets and novelists she cared about, English and foreign.  They left her stimulated but unsatisfied.  There were not enough good ones to keep her going.  She worked through the Elizabethan dramatists and all the Vicar’s Tudor Classics, and came on Jowett’s Translations of the Platonic Dialogues by the way, and was lured on the quest of Ultimate Reality, and found that there was nothing like Thought to keep you from thinking.  She took to metaphysics as you take to dram-drinking.  She must have strong, heavy stuff that drugged her brain.  And when she found that she could trust her intellect she set it deliberately to fight her passion.

At first it was an even match, for Gwenda’s intellect, like her body, was robust.  It generally held its ground from Thursday morning till Tuesday night.  But the night that followed Wednesday afternoon would see its overthrow.

This Wednesday it fought gallantly till the very moment of Steven’s arrival.  She was still reading Bergson, and her brain struggled to make out the sense and rhythm of the sentences across the beating of her heart.

After seven years her heart still beat at Steven’s coming.

It remained an excitement and adventure, for she never knew how he would be.  Sometimes he hadn’t a word to say to her and left her miserable.  Sometimes, after a hard day’s work, he would be tired and heavy; she saw him middle-aged and her heart would ache for him.  Sometimes he would be young almost as he used to be.  She knew that he was only young for her.  He was young because he loved her.  She had never seen him so with Mary.  Sometimes he would be formal and frigid.  He talked to her as a man talks to a woman he is determined to keep at a distance.  She hated Steven then, as passion hates.  He had come before now in a downright bad temper and was the old, irritable Steven who found fault with everything she said and did.  And she had loved him for it as she had loved the old Steven.  It was his queer way of showing that he loved her.

But he had not been like that for a very long time.  He had grown gentler as he had grown older.