I tell you there was no end to the tortures they
inflicted upon him.

Night after night he would hear them talking; talking; maddened,
sweating, seeking oblivion in drink, he would lie there and hear the
voices going on and on. And day after day Leonora would come to him and
would announce the results of their deliberations.

They were like judges debating over the sentence upon a criminal; they
were like ghouls with an immobile corpse in a tomb beside them. I don't
think that Leonora was any more to blame than the girl--though Leonora
was the more active of the two. Leonora, as I have said, was the
perfectly normal woman. I mean to say that in normal circumstances her
desires were those of the woman who is needed by society. She desired
children, decorum, an establishment; she desired to avoid waste, she
desired to keep up appearances. She was utterly and entirely normal even
in her utterly undeniable beauty. But I don't mean to say that she acted
perfectly normally in this perfectly abnormal situation. All the world
was mad around her and she herself, agonized, took on the complexion of
a mad woman; of a woman very wicked; of the villain of the piece. What
would you have? Steel is a normal, hard, polished substance. But, if you
put it in a hot fire it will become red, soft, and not to be handled. If
you put it in a fire still more hot it will drip away. It was like
that with Leonora. She was made for normal circumstances--for Mr Rodney
Bayham, who will keep a separate establishment, secretly, in Portsmouth,
and make occasional trips to Paris and to Budapest.

In the case of Edward and the girl, Leonora broke and simply went all
over the place. She adopted unfamiliar and therefore extraordinary and
ungraceful attitudes of mind. At one moment she was all for revenge.
After haranguing the girl for hours through the night she harangued for
hours of the day the silent Edward. And Edward just once tripped up, and
that was his undoing. Perhaps he had had too much whisky that afternoon.
She asked him perpetually what he wanted. What did he want? What did he
want? And all he ever answered was: "I have told you". He meant that
he wanted the girl to go to her father in India as soon as her father
should cable that he was ready to receive her. But just once he tripped
up. To Leonora's eternal question he answered that all he desired in
life was that--that he could pick himself together again and go on with
his daily occupation