Yet he would gladly have had his wife’s sympathy.  He neither loved nor hated her, but she was for ever above him, and, however unconsciously, he longed. for her regard.  Irreproachable, reticent, it might be dying, Adela would no longer affect interests she did not feel.  To these present words of his she replied only with a grave, not unkind, look; a look he could not under stand, yet which humbled rather than irritated him.

The servant opened the door and announced a visitor—­’Mr. Hilary.’

Mutimer seemed struck with a thought as he heard the name.

‘The very man!’ he exclaimed below his breath, with a glance at Adela.  ’Just run off and let us have this room.  My luck won’t desert me, see if it does!’

CHAPTER XXXII

Mr. Willis Rodman scarcely relished the process which deprived him of his town house and of the greater part of his means, but his exasperation happily did not seek vent for itself in cruelty to his wife.  It might very well have done so, would all but certainly, had not Alice appealed to his sense of humour by her zeal in espousing his cause against her brother.  That he could turn her round his finger was an old experience, but to see her spring so actively to arms on his behalf, when he was conscious that she had every excuse for detesting him, and even abandoning him, struck him as a highly comical instance of his power over women, a power on which he had always prided himself.  He could not even explain it as self-interest in her; numberless things proved the contrary.  Alice was still his slave, though he had not given himself the slightest trouble to preserve even her respect.  He had shown himself to her freely as he was, jocosely cynical on everything that women prize, brutal when he chose to give way to his temper, faithless on principle, selfish to the core; perhaps the secret of the fascination he exercised over her was his very ingenuousness, his boldness in defying fortune, his clever grasp of circumstances.  She said to him one day, when he had been telling her that as likely as not she might have to take in washing or set up a sewing-machine: 

’I am not afraid.  You can always get money.  There’s nothing you can’t do.’

He laughed.

’That may be true.  But how if I disappear some day and leave you to take care of yourself?’

He had often threatened this in his genial way, and it never failed to blanch her cheeks.

‘If you do that,’ she said, ‘I shall kill myself.’

At which he laughed yet more loudly.