Their absence stood for the immense spiritual want through which her marriage had been made void.  Brooding on it, she closed her heart to her unspiritual husband.  She looked round the room with her cold disenchanted eyes.  Numberless signs of his thought and care for her rebuked her, and rebuking, added to her misery.  As her restlessness increased, it occurred to her that she might find some satisfaction in arranging the furniture on an entirely different plan.  She rang the bell and sent for Walter.  He came, and found her sitting on the high-backed chair whose cover had been worked by his grandmother.  He smiled at the uncomfortable figure she presented.

“So that’s what you call resting, is it?”

“Walter—­do you mind if I move some of the furniture in this room?”

“Move it?  Of course I don’t.  But why?”

“Because I don’t very much like the room as it is.”

“Why don’t you like it?” (He really wanted to know.)

“Because I don’t feel comfortable in it.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, dear.  Perhaps—­we’d better have some new things.”

“I don’t want any new things.”

“What do you want, then?” His voice was gentleness itself.

“Just to move all the old ones—­to move everything.”

She spoke with an almost infantile petulance that appealed to him as pathetic.  There was something terrible about Anne when armoured in the cold steel of her spirituality, taking her stand upon a lofty principle.  But Anne, sitting on a high-backed chair, uttering tremulous absurdities, Anne, protected by the unconscious humour of her own ill-temper, was adorable.  He loved this humanly captious and capricious, childishly unreasonable Anne.  And her voice was sweet even in petulance.

“My darling,” he said, “you shall turn the whole house upside down if it makes you any happier.  But”—­he looked round the room in quest of its deficiencies—­“what’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing’s wrong.  You don’t understand.”

“No, I don’t.”  His eye fell upon the corner where the piano once stood that was now in Edith’s room.

“There are three things,” said he, “that you certainly ought to have.  A piano, and a reading-stand, and a comfortable sofa.  You shall have them.”

She threw back her head and closed her eyes to shut out the stupidity, and the mockery, and the misery of that idea.

“I—­don’t—­want”—­she spoke slowly.  Her voice dropped from its high petulant pitch, and rounded to its funeral-bell note—­“I don’t want a piano, nor a reading-stand, nor a sofa.  I simply want a place that I can call my own.”

“But, bless you, the whole house is your own, if it comes to that, and every mortal thing in it.  Everything I’ve got’s yours except my razors and my braces, and a few little things of that sort that I’m keeping for myself.”

She passed her hand over her forehead, as if to brush away the irritating impression of his folly.