(he never read and did not know one note from another) because they were important to her and had therefore received a consecration they could never have had by merely being important to him.  It was all so very simple—­What she admired was beautiful; what she laughed at was funny; what she loved was divine—­And she belonged to him—­Robert.  It was a miracle that found him every night on his knees in humble gratitude.  She had, he thought, been so wonderfully good, walking on his red baize carpets as if they were fields of flowers, learning Sanscrit with passion and pretending, with what seemed to him complete success, and to them, absolute failure, that she liked Anglo-Indian women.  When one by one his staff were incapacitated by love, he never complained.  It made them of course useless, but how could they help falling in love with her?  It would have been so unnatural if they had not.  And when she told him—­and to do her justice she knew that she was telling him the truth—­that she was not worthy to do up his shoe laces—­he would laugh and kiss her hand and send up a little internal prayer to God to be able to do something to deserve his wife.

No wonder he was always urging her to go home—­haunted as he was by the feeling of having put her in a prison and, no wonder, not having his iron character, she had finally succumbed—­as she so often succumbed to his unselfishness.

How she was loving England!  The wet, heavy air—­the sky curtained with clouds—­the drenched leaves—­the saturated flowers—­the damp breathing earth—­the distant lethargic sun.  She could feel a pulse in the sopping soil and her heart beat with it.

Finding her friends too was such an adventure.  What struck her most about them was that they seemed so stationary.  There they were, just as she had left them, doing the same things, thinking the same things, saying the same things—­fixed points with their lives revolving round them, seeming to have lost the capacity for independent motion.

She and Robert were not like that.  Thank God, they were still pilgrims.  After all, her life had been a big spacious thing in spite of India, because of India and, even more, because of Robert.  Only she did not want to think about it now.  Just to go on repeating to herself:  “I’m at home.  I’m in England.”

And she was going to stay with St. John.  How excited she would have been four years ago.  How her heart had beaten when she heard his footsteps, how she had thrilled when he had said “dear” to her.  She remembered the care he had taken of her, the beautiful considerate devotion he had always shown her when she was longing so passionately for other things, trying with all her might and main to make him lose his head. How badly she had behaved.  She could wonder now dispassionately whether he had ever been in love with her.  On the whole, she thought, he never had.  If she had not been married—­it was a silly “if.”  The most he had said was “you make things very