who
was so kind to me. I was staying in the country, in a cottage, with Mr
and Mrs Fyne. It was there that we met. He came on a visit. He
noticed me. I--well--we are married now."

She was thankful that his eyes were shut. It made it easier to talk of
the future she had arranged, which now was an unalterable thing. She
did not enter on the path of confidences. That was impossible. She
felt he would not understand her. She felt also that he suffered. Now
and then a great anxiety gripped her heart with a mysterious sense of
guilt--as though she had betrayed him into the hands of an enemy. With
his eyes shut he had an air of weary and pious meditation. She was a
little afraid of it. Next moment a great pity for him filled her heart.
And in the background there was remorse. His face twitched now and
then just perceptibly. He managed to keep his eyelids down till he
heard that the `husband' was a sailor and that he, the father, was being
taken straight on board ship ready to sail away from this abominable
world of treacheries, and scorns and envies and lies, away, away over
the blue sea, the sure, the inaccessible, the uncontaminated and
spacious refuge for wounded souls.

Something like that. Not the very words perhaps but such was the
general sense of her overwhelming argument--the argument of refuge.

I don't think she gave a thought to material conditions. But as part of
that argument set forth breathlessly, as if she were afraid that if she
stopped for a moment she could never go on again, she mentioned that
generosity of a stormy type, which had come to her from the sea, had
caught her up on the brink of unmentionable failure, had whirled her
away in its first ardent gust and could be trusted now, implicitly
trusted, to carry them both, side by side, into absolute safety.

She believed it, she affirmed it. He understood thoroughly at last, and
at once the interior of that cab, of an aspect so pacific in the eyes of
the people on the pavements, became the scene of a great agitation. The
generosity of Roderick Anthony--the son of the poet--affected the
ex-financier de Barral in a manner which must have brought home to Flora
de Barral the extreme arduousness of the business of being a woman.
Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists
principally of dealings with men. This man--the man inside the cab--
cast off his stiff placidity and behaved like an animal. I don't mean
it in a