‘It’s awful,’ she said, and repeated, ‘it’s awful.’

‘Yes, child, but what is?’ asked Mrs. Willoughby.

‘All is—­I mean everything is,’ sobbed Clarice.

Mrs. Willoughby recognised that though the correction amended the grammar, it did not simplify the meaning.  She pressed for something more precise.

‘Don’t be irritable, Connie,’ quavered Clarice, ’because that’s just what Sidney is—­and always.  It’s so difficult to make you understand.  But he’s just a lot of wires, and they keep twanging all day.  He nags—­there’s no other word for it—­he nags about everything—­the servants, his publishers, the dinner, and—­oh!—­oh!—­why can’t he wear boots in the morning?’

The point of the question was lost on Mrs. Willoughby.  She began to expostulate with Clarice for magnifying trifles.

‘Of course,’ replied Clarice, sitting up suddenly—­she had been half lying on the sofa in Mrs. Willoughby’s arms—­’I know they are trifles; I know that.  But make every day full of them, every day repeat them!  Oh, it’s awful!  I wonder I don’t break down!’ She turned again to Mrs. Willoughby, lapsing from vehemence to melancholy as the notion occurred to her.  ’Connie, I believe I shall—­break down altogether.  You know I’m not very strong.’  She put her arms about Mrs. Willoughby, and clung to her in the intensity of her self-compassion.  ’You can’t imagine the strain it is.  And if that wasn’t enough, his mother comes up from Clapham and lectures me.  I wouldn’t mind that, only she’s not very safe about her h’s, and she stops to dinner and talks about the nobility she’s had cooks from, to impress the servants.  It’s so humiliating, to be lectured by any one like that.’

Mrs. Willoughby scented a fact.  ’But what does she lecture you about?  The dinner?’ she asked, with an irrelevant recollection of Drake’s impression of Clarice as one little adapted for housewifely duties, and not rightly to be troubled by them.

’Oh no.  She says I don’t give Sidney the help he expected from me.  But what more can I do?  He has got me.  Sidney says the same, too.  He told me that he had never had so much difficulty to work properly as since we were married.  And when his work doesn’t succeed I know he blames me for it.  Oh, Connie! is it my fault?  I think we had better get divorced—­and I—­I—­c-c-can go into a convent, and never do anybody any more harm.’

Clarice glanced as she spoke down the neatest of morning frocks, and the mental picture which she straightway had of herself in a white-washed cell with iron bars, clad in shapeless black, her chin swathed, her face under eaves of starched linen, induced an access of weeping.