aid; "it's to your advantage to be free as
well as to mine. That old matter is too old."

"I have told you."

"Do you mean to tell me there has been nothing--nobody?"

"Nobody. You must go to your own life."

Stung by that retort, Soames moved towards the piano and back to
the hearth, to and fro, as he had been wont in the old days in their
drawing-room when his feelings were too much for him.

"That won't do," he said. "You deserted me. In common justice it's for
you...."

He saw her shrug those white shoulders, heard her murmur:

"Yes. Why didn't you divorce me then? Should I have cared?"

He stopped, and looked at her intently with a sort of curiosity. What on
earth did she do with herself, if she really lived quite alone? And why
had he not divorced her? The old feeling that she had never understood
him, never done him justice, bit him while he stared at her.

"Why couldn't you have made me a good wife?" he said.

"Yes; it was a crime to marry you. I have paid for it. You will find
some way perhaps. You needn't mind my name, I have none to lose. Now I
think you had better go."

A sense of defeat--of being defrauded of his self-justification, and of
something else beyond power of explanation to himself, beset Soames
like the breath of a cold fog. Mechanically he reached up, took from the
mantel-shelf a little china bowl, reversed it, and said:

"Lowestoft. Where did you get this? I bought its fellow at Jobson's."
And, visited by the sudden memory of how, those many years ago, he and
she had bought china together, he remained staring at the little bowl,
as if it contained all the past. Her voice roused him.

"Take it. I don't want it."

Soames put it back on the shelf.

"Will you shake hands?" he said.

A faint smile curved her lips. She held out her hand. It was cold to his
rather feverish touch. 'She's made of ice,' he thought--'she was always
made of ice!' But even as that thought darted through him, his senses
were assailed by the perfume of her dress and body, as though the warmth
within her, which had never been for him, were struggling to show its
presence. And he turned on his heel. He walked out and away, as if
someone with a whip were after him, not even looking for a cab, glad of
the empty Embankment and the cold river, and the thick-strewn shadows
of the plane-tree leaves--confused, flurried, sore at heart, and vaguely
disturbed, as though he had made some deep mistake whose consequences