Laura Clowes in this period went through an experience almost equally formative.  Two years older than Bernard, she was also more mature for her years and had developed more evenly, and from the outset her engagement and marriage had meant more to her then to Bernard, because her girlhood had been unhappy and they provided a way of escape.  Her sister Yvonne had met Jack Bendish at a race-meeting and he had fallen madly in love with her and married her in a month in the teeth of opposition.  That was luck—­heaven-sent luck, for Yvonne on the night before her marriage had broken down utterly and confessed that if Jack had not saved her she would have gone off with the first man who asked her on any terms, because she was twenty-nine and sick to death of wandering with her father on the outskirts of society.  Subsequently Yvonne had after a hard fight won a footing at Wharton for herself and her sister, and there Laura had met Clowes, not such a social prize as Jack, but rich and able to give his wife an assured position.  She was shrewd and realized that in himself he had little to offer beyond a handsome and highly trained physique and a mind that worked lucidly within the limits of a narrow imagination but she was beyond all words grateful to him, and he fascinated her more than she realized.

The ten days at Eastbourne opened her eyes.  Bernard enjoyed every minute of them and was exceedingly pleased with himself and proud of his wife, but for Laura they were a time of heavy strain.  Innocent and shy, she had feared her husband, only to discover that she loved him better than he was capable of loving her.  Laura was not blind.  She understood Bernard and all his limitations, the dangerous grip that his passions had of him, his boyish impatience, his wild-bull courage, and his inability to distinguish between a wife and a mistress:  she was happiest when he slept, always holding her in his arms, exacting even in sleep, but so naively youthful in the bloom of his four and twenty summers, and, for the moment, all her own.  She loved him “because I am I—­because you are you,” and her tenderness was edged with the profound pity that women felt in those days for the men who came to them under the shadow of death.  It was her hope that the strong half-developed nature would grow to meet her need.  It grew swiftly enough:  in the forcing-house of pain he soon learned to think and to feel:  but the change did not lead him to his wife’s heart.

Laura had married a man of a class and apparently normal to a fault:  she found herself united now to incarnate storm and tempest.  The first time she saw him at Surbiton, he drove her out in five minutes with curses and insult.  Why?  Laura, wandering about half-stunned in the visitors’ room, had no idea why.  She stumbled against the furniture:  she looked at the photographs of Windermere and King’s College Chapel and the Nursing Staff on the walls:  she took up Punch and began to read it.  Laura was no dreamer, she had never doubted that her husband would rather have the use of his legs again than all the feminine devotion in the world, but she had hoped to soothe him, perhaps for a little while to make him forget:  it had not crossed her mind that her anguish of love and service would be rejected.  Enlightenment was like folding a sword to her breast.