every one
to dwell apart--ended in continued rows; but it had seemed so quite
impossible with Helena. Perhaps it always did!...

So sweet and pliable and ignorant of life she had been--yes, this was a
new Helena and more like the old Ruth!

No, he would not go back.

He would be hanged if he encouraged her.

CHAPTER IX

CINDERELLA

Helena tried not to look as though she minded when Hubert came down,
glorious in evening dress at six o'clock.

"It _is_ an early start," she said cheerfully.

"Yes," he replied; "but that means I shall be home all the earlier.
The dinner begins at seven and I shan't make a long speech--trust
me--so you can expect me back not later than half past ten or eleven at
the very latest."

He just restrained himself from saying once more that he thought her
stupid not to go across to the Institute instead of moping all alone
till then. Even so his farewell was a little cold for, though he kept
silence, he could not help feeling she had been selfish over the whole
business. Her air of martyrdom had rubbed some gilt off the occasion's
splendour.

As for Helena, having waved him gaily out of sight, she did not return
and give way to a natural sorrow, as he imagined, typically penitent so
soon as he had parted from her. She looked, it is true, hard and
thoughtful for a moment. Then she laughed almost happily. What did it
matter really? It would only be one evening alone, one lecture
missed;--and who was Mrs. Boyd? Why of course any one really nice
would be glad that her husband had been honoured by these beastly Kit
Kats, whoever they might be.

She sat down and wrote a long letter--about everything else in the
world--to her lonely mother, who after all never had any one at all to
dine with her, unless you counted clergymen.

That finished, it was dinner-time and that was fun because she had
ordered or brought in all her pet kickshaws--shrimps, dough-nuts and so
forth--which Hubert always vetoed, describing them expansively as dirty
feeding. Men, she decided, got so little out of life; always beef and
cabbages and yesterday to-morrow....

It was really quite a philosophic meal. She often was alone, for some
big part indeed in every day, but there was something in this first
lonely dinner that made a curious break and gave, as the French say, to
think. She thought of her old life in Devonshire; she thought of her
ambitions towards self-development when she decided upon