“Come in,” said Major Clowes in a rasping snarl, and Laura came into her husband’s room and stumbled over a chair.  The windows were shuttered and the room was still dark at eleven o’clock of a fine June morning.  Laura, irrepressibly annoyed, groped her way through a disorder of furniture, which seemed, as furniture always does in the dark, to be out of place and malevolently full of corners, and without asking leave flung down a shutter and flung up a window.  In a field across the river they were cutting hay, and the dry summer smell of it breathed in, and with it the long rolling whirr of a haymaking machine and its periodical clash, most familiar of summer noises.  And the June daylight lit up the gaunt body of Bernard Clowes stretched out on a water mattress, his silk jacket unbuttoned over his strong, haggard throat.  “Really, Berns,” said Laura, flinging down a second shutter, “I don’t wonder you sleep badly.  The room is positively stuffy!  I should have a racking headache if I slept in it.”

“Well, you don’t, you see,” Bernard replied politely.  “Stop pulling those blinds about.  Come over here.”  Laura came to him.  “Kiss me,” said Clowes, and she laid her cool lips on his cheek.  Clowes received her kiss passively:  even Laura, though she understood him pretty well, never was sure whether he made her kiss him because he liked it or because he thought she did not like it.

“Where are you off to now?” asked Clowes, pushing her away:  “you look very smart.  I like that cotton dress.  It is cotton, isn’t it?” he rubbed the fabric gingerly between his finger and thumb.  “Did Catherine make it?  That girl is a jewel.  I like that gipsy hat too, it’s a pretty shape and it shades your eyes.  I call that sensible, which can’t often be said for a woman’s clothes.  You have good eyes, Laura, well worth shading, though your figure is your trump card.  I like these fitting bodices that give a woman a chance to show what shape she is.  All you Selincourt women score in evening gowns.  Yvonne has a topping figure, though she’s an ugly little devil.  She has an American complexion and her eyes aren’t as good as yours.  Where did you say you were going?”

“To the station to meet Lawrence.  I promised to fetch him in the car.”

“Lawrence?  So he’s due today, is he?  I’d forgotten all about him.  And you’re meeting him?  Oh yes, that explains the dress and hat, I thought you wouldn’t have put them on for my benefit.”

“Dear, it’s only one of the cotton frocks I wear every day, and I couldn’t go driving without a hat, could I?”

“Can’t conceive why you want to go at all.”  Laura was silent.  “If Lawrence must be met, why can’t Miller go alone?” Miller was the chauffeur.  “Undignified, I call it, the way you women run after a man nowadays.  You think men like it but they don’t.”

Laura wondered if she dared tell him not to be silly.  He might take it with a grin, in which case he would probably relent and let her go:  or—?  The field of alternative conjecture was wide.  In the end Laura, whose knee was still aching from her adventure with the chair, decided to chance it.  But—­perhaps because they were suffused with irritation—­the words had no sooner left her lips than she regretted them.