Sir Nigel had retired from the scene, but he had done so feeling that he had planted a seed and bestowed a practical lesson.  He had, it is true, bestowed one, but again she had not understood its significance and was only left bewildered and unhappy.  She began to be nervous and uncertain about herself and about his moods and points of view.  She had never been made to feel so at home.  Everyone had been kind to her and lenient to her lack of brilliancy.  No one had expected her to be brilliant, and she had been quite sweet-temperedly resigned to the fact that she was not the kind of girl who shone either in society or elsewhere.  She did not resent the fact that she knew people said of her, “She isn’t in the least bit bright, Rosy Vanderpoel, but she’s a nice, sweet little thing.”  She had tried to be nice and sweet and had aspired to nothing higher.

But now that seemed so much less than enough.  Perhaps Nigel ought to have married one of the clever ones, someone who would have known how to understand him and who would have been more entertaining than she could be.  Perhaps she was beginning to bore him, perhaps he was finding her out and beginning to get tired.  At this point the always too ready tears would rise to her eyes and she would be overwhelmed by a sense of homesickness.  Often she cried herself silently to sleep, longing for her mother—­her nice, comfortable, ordinary mother, whom she had several times felt Nigel had some difficulty in being unreservedly polite to—­though he had been polite on the surface.

By the time they landed she had been living under so much strain in her effort to seem quite unchanged, that she had lost her nerve.  She did not feel well and was sometimes afraid that she might do something silly and hysterical in spite of herself, begin to cry for instance when there was really no explanation for her doing it.  But when she reached London the novelty of everything so excited her that she thought she was going to be better, and then she said to herself it would be proved to her that all her fears had been nonsense.  This return of hope made her quite light-spirited, and she was almost gay in her little outbursts of delight and admiration as she drove about the streets with her husband.  She did not know that her ingenuous ignorance of things he had known all his life, her rapture over common monuments of history, led him to say to himself that he felt rather as if he were taking a housemaid to see a Lord Mayor’s Show.

Before going to Stornham Court they spent a few days in town.  There had been no intention of proclaiming their presence to the world, and they did not do so, but unluckily certain tradesmen discovered the fact that Sir Nigel Anstruthers had returned to England with the bride he had secured in New York.  The conclusion to be deduced from this circumstance was that the particular moment was a good one at which to send in bills for “acct. rendered.”  The tradesmen quite shared Anstruthers’ point of view.  Their reasoning was delightfully simple and they were wholly unaware that it might have been called gross.  A man over his head and ears in debt naturally expected his creditors would be paid by the young woman who had married him.  America had in these days been so little explored by the thrifty impecunious well-born that its ingenuous sentimentality in certain matters was by no means comprehended.