and the effect upon a constitutionally evil temper was to transform it into an infernal one.  The night had been a bad one for Rosy.  Such floods of homesick longing had overpowered her that she had not been able to sleep.  She had risen feeling shaky and hysterical and her nervousness had been added to by her fear that Nigel might observe her and make comment.  Of course she told herself it was natural that he should not wish her to appear at Stornham Court looking a pale, pink-nosed little fright.  Her efforts to be cheerful had indeed been somewhat touching, but they had met with small encouragement.

She thought the green-clothed country lovely as the train sped through it, and a lump rose in her small throat because she knew she might have been so happy if she had not been so frightened and miserable.  The thing which had been dawning upon her took clearer, more awful form.  Incidents she had tried to explain and excuse to herself, upon all sorts of futile, simple grounds, began to loom up before her in something like their actual proportions.  She had heard of men who had changed their manner towards girls after they had married them, but she did not know they had begun to change so soon.  This was so early in the honeymoon to be sitting in a railway carriage, in a corner remote from that occupied by a bridegroom, who read his paper in what was obviously intentional, resentful solitude.  Emily Soame’s father, she remembered it against her will, had been obliged to get a divorce for Emily after her two years of wretched married life.  But Alfred Soames had been quite nice for six months at least.  It seemed as if all this must be a dream, one of those nightmare things, in which you suddenly find yourself married to someone you cannot bear, and you don’t know how it happened, because you yourself have had nothing to do with the matter.  She felt that presently she must waken with a start and find herself breathing fast, and panting out, half laughing, half crying, “Oh, I am so glad it’s not true!  I am so glad it’s not true!”

But this was true, and there was Nigel.  And she was in a new, unexplored world.  Her little trembling hands clutched each other.  The happy, light girlish days full of ease and friendliness and decency seemed gone forever.  It was not Rosalie Vanderpoel who pressed her colourless face against the glass of the window, looking out at the flying trees; it was the wife of Nigel Anstruthers, and suddenly, by some hideous magic, she had been snatched from the world to which she belonged and was being dragged by a gaoler to a prison from which she did not know how to escape.  Already Nigel had managed to convey to her that in England a woman who was married could do nothing to defend herself against her husband, and that to endeavour to do anything was the last impossible touch of vulgar ignominy.