sified her hostility to the
Duchess, so therefore it had intensified her perception of Breton. His
letter had aroused in her, just as contact with him aroused in her,
everything in her that now, for her own peace of mind, she should keep
at bay. His letter had amounted to this:

"You are a rebel as I am a rebel. We have said very little, but you have
recognized in me the things that I have recognized in you. You have
escaped through marriage, but for me there is no escape, and if you
would, for the sake of those things that we have in common, keep me from
going utterly under, then you must help me--as only you can."

He did not say this nor anything at all like this. He only, very
quietly, congratulated her on her marriage, hoped that she would be very
happy, said that London was a little desolate and difficult, hoped that
she would not think more harshly of him than she could help, and, at the
very end, told her that meeting her made him feel that he was not
entirely abandoned by everybody.

It was the letter of a weak man and she knew it, but it was the letter
of a man who was weak exactly in the places where she also failed. And
this, more than anything else, moved her.

They two alone, it seemed, were struggling to keep their feet in a world
that did not need them. It had been, through these months, Rachel's
sharpest unhappiness, the consciousness that Roddy and indeed everything
at Seddon Court could get on so very well without her.

Nobody in London needed her--nobody here needed her. If you accepted the
Beaminster doctrine, then no wife would demand more from a husband than
Roddy gave Rachel--but was this not simply another proof that Rachel had
made a Beaminster marriage?

Rachel had been flung straight from the schoolroom into marriage and the
sensitive agonizing cry of a child to be loved by somebody--the cry that
had always been so urgent in her--was urgent still.

It was exactly this comfortable sense of being a help that Roddy had not
given her. Now this letter gave it to her.

But if this letter was an appeal, just as the mongrel Jacob, now at her
feet, was an appeal, on the part of someone wounded and outcast, to her
pity, so also was it an invitation to rebellion.

It was also a temptation to deceit and, did she answer the letter, she
encouraged Breton to write again; she opened up not only a new
relationship to him, but also a new relationship to all the forces that
were most hostile to Roddy