“What do I expect you to do?” he repeated after her.  “Why don’t you write home to your people and get some money out of them?”

Now that he had said what was in his mind, he faced her with a bullying swagger.  Had he been a bigger man he might have tried the effect of physical bullying on her.  One of his numerous reasons for resenting her was that she was the taller of the two.

She made no reply.

“Now you needn’t turn pale and begin all that fuss over again.  What I’m suggesting is a perfectly reasonable thing.  If I haven’t got money I haven’t got it.  I can’t invent it.”

She perceived that he was ready for one of their periodical tempestuous quarrels.  But that day she felt too tired and unwell to quarrel.  His warning against a repetition of ‘fuss’ had reference to the gastric dizziness from which she had been suffering for two years.  It would take her usually after a meal.  She did not swoon, but her head swam and she could not stand.  She would sink down wherever she happened to be, and, her face alarmingly white, murmur faintly:  “My salts.”  Within five minutes the attack had gone and left no trace.  She had been through one just after lunch.  He resented this affection.  He detested being compelled to hand the smelling-bottle to her, and he would have avoided doing so if her pallor did not always alarm him.  Nothing but this pallor convinced him that the attacks were not a deep ruse to impress him.  His attitude invariably implied that she could cure the malady if she chose, but that through obstinacy she did not choose.

“Are you going to have the decency to answer my question, or aren’t you?”

“What question?” Her vibrating voice was low and restrained.

“Will you write to your people?”

“For money?”

The sarcasm of her tone was diabolic.  She could not have kept the sarcasm out of her tone; she did not attempt to keep it out.  She cared little if it whipped him to fury.  Did he imagine, seriously, that she would be capable of going on her knees to her family?  She?  Was he unaware that his wife was the proudest and the most obstinate woman on earth; that all her behaviour to him was the expression of her pride and her obstinacy?  Ill and weak though she felt, she marshalled together all the forces of her character to defend her resolve never, never to eat the bread of humiliation.  She was absolutely determined to be dead to her family.  Certainly, one December, several years previously, she had seen English Christmas cards in an English shop in the Rue de Rivoli, and in a sudden gush of tenderness towards Constance, she had despatched a coloured greeting to Constance and her mother.  And having initiated the custom, she had continued it.  That was not like asking a kindness; it was bestowing a kindness.  But except for the annual card, she was dead to St. Luke’s Square.  She was one of those daughters who disappear and are not discussed in the family circle.  The thought of her immense foolishness, the little tender thoughts of Constance, some flitting souvenir, full of unwilling admiration, of a regal gesture of her mother,—­these things only steeled her against any sort of resurrection after death.