.

But she flung herself back and writhed and sobbed again. He sat down and
watched with her. In silence and utter hopelessness he watched.
Presently she lay motionless, worn out.

* * * * *

At one o'clock Winny knocked at the door and said dinner was ready.

Violet stirred. "What's the good of sitting staring there like a stuck
ox?" She raised herself. "Since you _are_ there you can get me that
eau-de-Cologne."

He brought it. He bathed her hands and forehead and wiped them with his
handkerchief.

She dragged herself downstairs and sat red-eyed through the dinner, the
materials for the picnic which Winny had unpacked and spread.

The day wore on. Violet dragged herself to her bed again, and lay there
all afternoon while Ransome hung about the house and garden, unable to
think, unable to work, or take an interest in anything. He was oppressed
by a sense of irremediable calamity.

At four o'clock he made tea and took it to Violet in her room.

She sat up, weak and submissive, and drank, crying softly.

She turned her face to him as she sank back on her pillow. "I'm sorry,
Ranny," she said; "but you shouldn't have married me. I'm not that sort.
I told you; and you see."

He could not remember when she had ever told him. But it was clear that
he saw. For he said to himself, "They say a lot of things they don't
mean when they're like this."

CHAPTER XXII

That was the first and by far the most impressive of their really great
scenes. There was no doubt about it, Violet could make scenes, and there
was no end to the scenes she made. But those that followed, like those
that had gone before, were beyond all comparison inferior. They lacked
vehemence, vividness, intensity. After that first passion of resentment
and revolt Violet declined upon sullenness and flat, monotonous
reproach.

Ransome put it all down to her condition. He set his mouth with a hard
grin and stuck it. He told himself that he had no illusions left, that
he saw the whole enormous folly of his marriage, and that he saw it
sanely, as Violet could not see it, without passion, without revolt,
without going back for one moment on anything that he or she had done.
He saw it simply as it was, as a thing that had to be. She, being the
more deeply injured of the two, must be forgiven her inability to see it
that way. He had done her a wrong in the beginning and he had made
reparation, and it was not the repara