The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Flaw in the Crystal, by May Sinclair

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Title: The Flaw in the Crystal

Author: May Sinclair

Release Date: April 26, 2009 [EBook #28615]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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The Flaw in the Crystal

By

May Sinclair

NEW YORK
E.P.DUTTON & COMPANY
31 West Twenty-Third Street

Copyright, 1912
By May Sinclair

CHAPTER ONE

It was Friday, the day he always came, if (so she safeguarded it) he was
to come at all. They had left it that way in the beginning, that it
should be open to him to come or not to come. They had not even settled
that it should be Fridays, but it always was, the week-end being the
only time when he could get away; the only time, he had explained to
Agatha Verrall, when getting away excited no remark. He had to, or he
would have broken down. Agatha called it getting away "from things"; but
she knew that there was only one thing, his wife Bella.

To be wedded to a mass of furious and malignant nerves (which was all
that poor Bella was now) simply meant destruction to a man like Rodney
Lanyon. Rodney's own nerves were not as strong as they had been, after
ten years of Bella's. It had been understood for long enough (understood
even by Bella) that if he couldn't have his weekends he was done for; he
couldn't possibly have stood the torment and the strain of her.

Of course, she didn't know he spent the greater part of them with Agatha
Verrall. It was not to be desired that she should know. Her obtuseness
helped them. Even in her younger and saner days she had failed,
persistently, to realise any profound and poignant thing that touched
him; so by the mercy of heaven she had never realised Agatha Verrall.
She used to say that she had never seen anything _in_ Agatha, which
amounted, as he once told her, to not seeing Agatha at all. Still less
could she have compassed any vision of the tie--the extraordinary,
intangible, immaterial tie that held them.

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