day of their acquaintance.  There was something compact and immovable about Flossie.  In those five years he had never known her change or modify an opinion of people or of things.  And yet Flossie was not stupid, or if she were her stupidity was a force; it had an invincible impetus and sweep, dragging the dead weight of character behind it.  It was beginning to terrify him.  In fact he was becoming painfully sensitive to everything she said or did.  Her little tongue was neither sharp nor hard, and yet it hurt him every time it spoke.  It did not always speak good grammar.  Sometimes, in moments of flurry or excitement, an aspirate miscarried.  Happily those moments were rare; for at bottom Flossie’s temperament was singularly calm.  Remembering his own past lapses, he felt that he was the last person to throw a stone at her; but that reflection did not prevent a shudder from going down his back every time it happened.  And if her speech remained irreproachable, the offending strain ran through all her movements.  He disliked the way she walked, and the way she sat down, the way she spread her skirts or gathered them, the way she carried her body and turned her head, the way her black eyes provoked a stare and then resented it, her changes of posture under observation, the perpetual movement of her hands that were always settling and resettling her hat, her hair, her veil; all the blushings and bridlings, the pruderies and impertinences of the pretty woman of her class, he disliked them all.  He more than disliked, he distrusted her air of over-strained propriety.  He detected in it the first note of falseness in her character.  In a thousand little things her instincts, her perceptions were at fault.

This was disagreeably borne in upon him that first Saturday after Lucia’s arrival, when he and Flossie were in the train going down to Ealing.  The compartment was packed with City men (how he wished Flossie would turn her head and not her eyes if she must look at them!); and as they got in at Earl’s Court, one of them, a polite person, gave up his seat to the lady.  Flossie turned an unseeing eye on the polite person, and took his seat with a superb pretence of having found it herself after much search.  And when Rickman said “Thanks” to the polite person her indignant glance informed him that she had expected support in her policy of repudiation.

“My dear Beaver,” he said as he helped her on to the platform at Ealing, “when you take another person’s seat the least you can do is to say Thank you.”

“I never speak to gentlemen in trains and buses.  That’s the way they always begin.”

“Good Heavens, the poor man was only being civil.”

“Thank you.  I’ve gone about enough to know what ’is kind of civility means.  I wasn’t going to lay myself open to impertinence.”

“I should have thought you’d gone about enough to know the difference.”

Flossie said nothing.  She was furious with him for his failure to defend her from the insulting advances of the City gentleman.  But perhaps she would hardly have taken it so seriously, if it had not been significant to her of a still more intolerable desertion.  Ada Bishop had said something to her just before they started, something that had been almost too much even for Flossie’s complacency.