He had nothing to say to so preposterous a charge.  His eyes were fixed more than ever on his plate.  She saw his face flush as he bowed his head in eating; she allowed her fancy to rest in its morbid abhorrence of the act, and in its suspicion of its grossness.  She went on, lashed by her fancy.  “I cannot understand your liking to go there so much, when you might go to the Eliotts or the Gardners.  They’re always asking you, and you haven’t been near them for a year.”

“Well, you see, the Hannays let me do what I like.  They don’t bother me.”

“Do the Eliotts bother you?”

“They bore me.  Horribly.”

“And the Gardners?”

“Sometimes—­a little.”

“And Canon Wharton?  No.  I needn’t ask.”

He laughed.  “You needn’t. He bores me to extinction.”

“I’m sorry it is my friends who are so unfortunate.”

“It’s your husband who’s unfortunate.  He is not an intellectual person.  Nor a spiritual one, either, I’m afraid.”

He looked up.  Anne had finished her morsel, and her fingers played irritably with the hand-bell at her side.  Poor Majendie’s abstraction had combined with his appetite to make him deplorably slow over his dinner.  She still sat watching him, pure from appetite, in resignation that veiled her contempt of the male hunger so incomprehensibly prolonged.  He had come to dread more than anything those attentive, sacrificial eyes.

“I’m awfully sorry,” he said, “to keep you waiting.”

She rang the bell.  “Will you have the lamp lit in the drawing-room or the study?”

He looked at her.  There was no lamp for him in her eyes.

“Whichever you like.  I think I shall go over to the Hannays’, after all.”

He went; and by the lamp in the drawing-room Anne sat and brooded in her turn.

She said to herself:  “It’s no use my trying to keep him from them.  It only irritates him.  He lets me see plainly that he prefers their society to mine.  I don’t wonder.  They can flatter him and kow-tow to him, and I cannot.  He can be a little god to them; and he must know what he is to me.  We haven’t a thought in common—­not a feeling—­and he cannot bear to feel himself inferior.  As for me—­if I’ve married beneath me, I must pay the penalty.”

But there was no penalty for her in these reflections.  They satisfied her.  They were part of the curious mental process by which she justified herself.

CHAPTER XXIII

Up to that moment when he had looked across the dinner table at Anne, Majendie had felt secure in the bonds of his marriage.  Anne’s repugnance had broken the natural tie; but up to that moment he had never doubted that the immaterial link still held.  If at times her presence was a bodily torment, at other times he felt it as a spiritual protection.  His immense charity made allowance for all the extraordinary