One thing he could do to restore his sanity.  He would walk over to Lavender Hill, and accompany his wife on her return home.  Indeed, the mere difficulty of getting through the afternoon advised this project.  He could not employ himself, and knew that his imagination, once inflamed, would leave him not a moment’s rest.  Yes, he would walk to Lavender Hill, and ramble about that region until Monica had had reasonable time for talk with her sister.

About three o’clock there fell a heavy shower of rain.  Strangely against his habits, Widdowson turned into a quiet public-house, and sat for a quarter of an hour at the bar, drinking a glass of whisky.  During the past week he had taken considerably more wine than usual at meals; he seemed to need the support.  Whilst sipping at his glass of spirits, he oddly enough fell into talk with the barmaid, a young woman of some charms, and what appeared to be unaffected modesty.  Not for twenty years had Widdowson conversed with a member of this sisterhood.  Their dialogue was made up of the most trifling of trivialities—­weather, a railway accident, the desirability of holidays at this season.  And when at length he rose and put an end to the chat it was with appreciable reluctance.

‘A good, nice sort of girl,’ he went away saying to himself.  ’Pity she should be serving at a bar—­hearing doubtful talk, and seeing very often vile sights.  A nice, soft-spoken little girl.’

And he mused upon her remembered face with a complacency which soothed his feelings.

Of a sudden he was checked by the conversion of his sentiment into thought.  Would he not have been a much happier man if he had married a girl distinctly his inferior in mind and station?  Provided she were sweet, lovable, docile—­such a wife would have spared him all the misery he had known with Monica.  From the first he had understood that Monica was no representative shopgirl, and on that very account he had striven so eagerly to win her.  But it was a mistake.  He had loved her, still loved her, with all the emotion of which he was capable.  How many hours’ genuine happiness of soul had that love afforded him?  The minutest fraction of the twelve months for which she had been his wife.  And of suffering, often amounting to frantic misery, he could count many weeks.  Could such a marriage as this be judged a marriage at all, in any true sense of the word?

’Let me ask myself a question.  If Monica were absolutely free to choose between continuing to live with me and resuming her perfect liberty, can I persuade myself that she would remain my wife?  She would not.  Not for a day, not for an hour.  Of that I am morally convinced.  And I acknowledge the grounds of her dissatisfaction.  We are unsuited to each other.  We do not understand each other.  Our marriage is physical and nothing more.  My love—­what is my love?  I do not love her mind, her intellectual part.  If I did, this frightful jealousy from which I suffer would be impossible.