He had married a beautiful and elegant woman, with vast unexploited capacities for love in her heart.  But he had married a capricious woman, and he knew it.  So far he had yielded to her caprices, as well became him; but in the depths of his masculine mind he had his own private notion as to the identity of the person who should ultimately be master in their house, and he had decided only the previous night that when the next moment for being firm arrived, firm he would be.

And now the moment was upon him.  It was their eyes that fought, silently, bitterly.  There is a great deal of bitterness in true love.

Stephen perceived the affair broadly, in all its aspects.  He was older and much more experienced than Vera, and therefore he was responsible for the domestic peace, and for her happiness, and for his own, and for appearances, and for various other things.  He perceived the moral degradation which would be involved in an open quarrel during the honeymoon.  He perceived the difficulties of a battle in the street, in such a select and prim street as the Strand, Torquay, where the very backbone of England’s respectability goes shopping.  He perceived Vera’s vast ignorance of life.  He perceived her charm, and her naughtiness, and all her defects.  And he perceived, further, that, this being the first conflict of their married existence, it was of the highest importance that he should emerge from it the victor.  To allow Vera to triumph would gravely menace their future tranquillity and multiply the difficulties which her adorable capriciousness would surely cause.  He could not afford to let her win.  It was his duty, not merely to himself but to her, to conquer.  But, on the other hand, he had never fully tested her powers of sheer obstinacy, her willingness to sacrifice everything for the satisfaction of a whim; and he feared these powers.  He had a dim suspicion that Vera was one of that innumerable class of charming persons who are perfectly delicious and perfectly sweet so long as they have precisely their own way—­and no longer.

Vera perceived only two things.  She perceived the hat—­although her back was turned towards it—­and she perceived the half-sovereign—­although it was hidden in Stephen’s pocket.

‘But, my dear,’ Stephen protested, ‘you know—­’

‘Will you lend me half-a-sovereign?’ Vera repeated, in a glacial tone.  The madness of a desired hat had seized her.  She was a changed Vera.  She was not a loving woman, not a duteous young wife, nor a reasoning creature.  She was an embodied instinct for hats.

‘It was most distinctly agreed,’ Stephen murmured, restraining his anger.

Just then Felix came out of the shop, followed by a procession of three men bearing cans of petrol.  If Stephen was Napoleon and Vera Wellington, Felix was the Blucher of this deplorable altercation.  Impossible to have a row—­yes, a row—­with your wife in the presence of your chauffeur, with his French ideas of chivalry.