She rose from her knees more calm and self-contained than ever, barely conscious of her wound.

So calm and so self-contained was she at dinner that Majendie had an agreeable rebound; he supposed that she had recovered from the abominable encounter, and had put Lady Cayley out of her head like a sensible woman.  Edith had received his account of that incident with a gravity that had made him profoundly uncomfortable; and his relief was in proportion to his embarrassment.  Unfortunately it gave him the appearance of complacency; and complacency in the circumstances was more than Anne could bear.  Coming straight from her exaltation and communion, she was crushed by the profound, invisible difference that separated them, the perpetual loneliness of her unwedded, unsubjugated soul.  They lived a whole earth and a whole heaven apart.  He was untouched by the fires that burnt and purified her.  The tragic crises that destroyed, the spiritual moments that built her up again, passed by him unperceived.  If she were to tell him how she had attained her present serenity of mind, by what vision, by what effort, by what sundering of body and soul, he would not understand.

And that was not the worst.  She had learnt not to look for that spiritual understanding in him.  It mattered little that her unique suffering and her unique consolation should remain alike ignored.  The terrible thing was that he should have come out of his own ordeal so smiling and so unconcerned; that he could have sinned as he had sinned, and that he could meet, after seven years, in his wife’s presence, the partner of his sin (whose face was a revelation of its grossness)—­meet her, and not be shaken by the shame of it.  It showed how lightly he held it, how low his standard was.  She recalled, shuddering, the woman’s face.  Nothing in the visions she had so shrunk from could compare with the violent reality.  For one moment of repulsion she saw him no less gross.  She wondered, would she have to reckon with that, henceforth, too?

She looked up, and met across the table the engaging innocence that she recognised as the habitual expression of his face.  He had no idea of what dreadful things she was thinking of him.  She put her thoughts from her, admitting that she had never had to reckon with that, yet.  But it was terrible to her that, while he forced her to such thinking, he could sit there so unconscious, and so unashamed.  He sat there, bright-eyed, smiling, a little flushed, playing with a light topic in a manner that suggested a conscience singularly at ease.  He went on sitting there, absolutely unembarrassed, eating dessert.  The eating of dinner was bad enough, it showed complacency.  But dessert argued callousness.  She had wondered how he could have any appetite at all.  Her dinner had almost choked her.

And she sat waiting for him to finish, hardly looking at him, detached, saint-like, and still.

At last her silence struck him as a little ominous.  He had distinct misgivings as they turned into the study for coffee and his cigarette.  Anne sat up in her chair, refusing the support and luxury of cushions, leaning a little forward with a brooding air.