There's nothing I like so much as to have
a little to chuck away. And I can do it, thanks to you."

That was really, she said, the happiest moment of her life. And he,
seeming to realize it, had ventured to pat her on the shoulder. He had,
ostensibly, come in to borrow a safety-pin of her. And the occasion of
her boxing Maisie's ears, had, after it was over, riveted in her mind
the idea that there was no intrigue between Edward and Mrs Maidan. She
imagined that, from henceforward, all that she had to do was to keep him
well supplied with money and his mind amused with pretty girls. She was
convinced that he was coming back to her. For that month she no longer
repelled his timid advances that never went very far. For he certainly
made timid advances. He patted her on the shoulder; he whispered into
her ear little jokes about the odd figures that they saw up at the
Casino. It was not much to make a little joke--but the whispering of it
was a precious intimacy....

And then--smash--it all went. It went to pieces at the moment when
Florence laid her hand upon Edward's wrist, as it lay on the glass
sheltering the manuscript of the Protest, up in the high tower with the
shutters where the sunlight here and there streamed in. Or, rather, it
went when she noticed the look in Edward's eyes as he gazed back into
Florence's. She knew that look.

She had known--since the first moment of their meeting, since the moment
of our all sitting down to dinner together--that Florence was
making eyes at Edward. But she had seen so many women make eyes at
Edward--hundreds and hundreds of women, in railway trains, in hotels,
aboard liners, at street corners. And she had arrived at thinking that
Edward took little stock in women that made eyes at him. She had formed
what was, at that time, a fairly correct estimate of the methods of,
the reasons for, Edward's loves. She was certain that hitherto they had
consisted of the short passion for the Dolciquita, the real sort of
love for Mrs Basil, and what she deemed the pretty courtship of Maisie
Maidan. Besides she despised Florence so haughtily that she could not
imagine Edward's being attracted by her. And she and Maisie were a
sort of bulwark round him. She wanted, besides, to keep her eyes on
Florence--for Florence knew that she had boxed Maisie's ears. And
Leonora desperately desired that her union with Edward should appear to
be flawless. But all that went....

With the answering gaze of E