y's heart was singing a hymn
to the blessed little feet that had so fetched him, the blessed little
tootsy-woots in the blessed little shoes. He knelt, adoring, to the hem
of the new white dress. He bowed his head under the benediction of the
hat.

The fact that Mercier was established in the chemist's pew opposite, and
was staring at the hat, and under it, did not interfere with his
devotions in the least. He could even afford to let old Jujubes walk
home with them, though he managed to shake him off adroitly at his shop
door. Nothing could really interfere with his devotions. For he felt
that those things, especially the shoes, were the outward and visible
signs of an inward and spiritual grace. Some grace that had descended
out of Heaven upon Violet.

The signs would be, no doubt, expensive; they should not have been so
much as dreamed of before Michaelmas, when he would get his rise; that
splendiferous get-up would in all probability just about clean him out,
rise and all; but he tried not to look on the dark side of it. He was
not one to quench the spirit or the smoking flax.

But, as the hours and the days went by, it was borne in upon him that
there was absolutely no connection between Violet's inward state and
that regenerated outside. This perturbed him; and it would have
perturbed him more but that he had other things to think of, and that in
any case he believed that a woman's clothes do not necessarily point to
an end beyond themselves.

Now, if he had been less preoccupied and had paid more heed to dates, he
would have noted three things: that it was on and after the evening of
Thursday, the twentieth, that her mood of gay excitement and of
satisfaction died and gave place to restlessness, irritation, and
expectancy (a strained and racking, a dismayed and balked expectancy);
that Thursday, the twentieth, was early-closing day in Southfields; and
that consequently Leonard Mercier was at large. And having gone thus far
in observation, he must have seen that it was on and after Thursday, the
twenty-seventh (early-closing day again) that she became intolerable.

Intolerable. There was no other word for it. The "_joie de veeve_" was
so intense that it was not to be borne. She had days of stupor now that
followed fits of fury. He didn't know which was the worse, the fury or
the stupor.

But it was the stupor that made him burst out one night (at supper; it
was always at supper that these things happened).