he
fact that, in all household matters, his wife was a slut and a slattern;
yet it staggered him when it first dawned on him that, in the awful
deterioration of Granville and the Baby, the standard of her own
toilette had gradually lowered. Then gradually he got inured to it. The
tousled, tumbling hair, the slipshod feet, the soiled blouse gaping at
the back, were, he reflected bitterly, in perfect harmony with
Granville, and of a piece with everything. He had ceased to censure
them; they belonged so inalienably to the drab monotone; they were so
indissolubly a part of all his life. And somehow she bloomed in spite of
them. Ranny's unconquerable soul still cried "Stick it!" as he grappled
with her shameless blouses.

And now, suddenly, she had changed all that. She had become once more
the creature of mysterious elegance, of beauty charged with magical
reminiscence, in the trim skirt and stainless blouse, clipped by the
close belt; and with the bit of narrow black velvet ribbon round her
throat. Even in the morning she appeared once more with a clear parting
in her brushed and burnished hair. Even in the morning her soft skin was
once more sweet in its sheer cleanness. And in the evening there soaked
through and fell and hung about her that old fragrance of violets that
invariably turned his head.

And she had bought new stockings and new shoes; openwork stockings that
showed her white feet through, and little, little shoes with immense
steel buckles. And her new mushroom with the big red roses round it
assaulted, battered, and beat into cocked hats all the other mushrooms
in the Avenue.

But it was the stockings and the shoes that made him kiss her feet when,
on Sunday, the sixteenth, he first saw them coming down the stairs.

"Do you like my shoes?" she said. And she stuck them out one after the
other. As she was standing four steps above him they were on a level
with his mouth; so he kissed them one after another, on the instep, just
above the buckles.

"Do you like my dress?"

"It's ripping."

"Do you like my hat?"

"It's an A 1 hat; but it's those feet that fetch me."

He had not been so fetched for a whole year. It was a most peculiar
fetching.

They went to church together (they had hired a little girl for the last
week to mind the toddling Baby in the mornings). It might have been for
church that she had put on that hat. It could only be for him that she
wore the shoes. All through the service Rann