She had made a household religion for herself, and would have suffered in departing from it.  To be always down before her husband for eight-o’clock breakfast; to sit with Edith from twelve till luncheon time, and in the early afternoon; to spend her evenings with her husband, reading aloud or talking, or sitting silent when silence soothed him; these things had become more sacred and imperative than her attendance at St. Saviour’s.  The hours of even-song struck for her no more.

For, above all, she had made a point of always being at home in time for Majendie’s return from his office.  At five o’clock she was ready for him, beside her tea-table, irreproachably dressed.  Her friends complained that they had lost sight of her.  Regularly at a quarter to five she would forsake the drawing-rooms of Thurston Square.  However absorbing Mrs. Eliott’s conversation, towards the quarter, the tender abstraction of Anne’s manner showed plainly that her spirit had surrendered to another charm.  Mrs. Eliott, in letting her go, had the air of a person serenely sane, indulgent to a persistent and punctual obsession.  Anne divided her friends into those who understood and those who didn’t.  Fanny Eliott would never understand.  But little Mrs. Gardner, through the immortality of her bridal spirit, understood completely.  And for Anne Mrs. Gardner’s understanding of her amounted to an understanding of her husband.  Anne’s heart went out to Mrs. Gardner.

Not that she saw much of her, either.  She had grown impatient of interests that lay outside her home.  Once she had decided to give herself up to her husband, other people’s claims appeared as an impertinence beside that perfection of possession.

She was less vividly aware of her own perfect possession of him.  Majendie was hardly aware of it himself.  His happiness was so profound that he had not yet measured it.  He, too, had slipped into the same imperturbable routine.  It was seldom that he kept her waiting past five o’clock.  He hated the people who made business appointments with him for that hour.  His old associates saw little of him, and his club knew him no more.  He preferred Anne’s society to that of any other person.  They had no more fear of each other.  He saw that she was beginning to forget.

In one thing only he was disappointed.  The trembling woman who had held him in her arms at Westleydale had never shown herself to him again.  She had been called, created, for an end beyond herself.  The woman he had married again was pure from passion, and of an uncomfortable reluctance in the giving and taking of caresses.  He forced himself to respect her reluctance.  He had simply to accept this emotional parsimony as one of the many curious facts about Anne.  He no longer went to Edith for an explanation of them, for the Anne he had known in Westleydale was too sacred to be spoken of.  An immense reverence possessed him when he thought of her.  As for the actual present Anne, loyalty was part of the large simplicity of his nature, and he could not criticise her.  Remembering Westleydale, he told himself that her blanched susceptibility was tenderness at white heat.  If she said little, he argued that (like himself) she felt the more.  And at times she could say perfect things.