om the physical desire but because of
a mental certitude. He was certain that if she had once submitted to him
she would remain his for ever. He knew that.

She was thinking that her aunt had said he had desired her to love him
from a distance of five thousand miles. She said: "I can never love you
now I know the kind of man you are. I will belong to you to save your
life. But I can never love you."

It was a fantastic display of cruelty. She didn't in the least know
what it meant--to belong to a man. But, at that Edward pulled himself
together. He spoke in his normal tones; gruff, husky, overbearing, as he
would have done to a servant or to a horse.

"Go back to your room," he said. "Go back to your room and go to sleep.
This is all nonsense."

They were baffled, those two women.

And then I came on the scene.

VI MY coming on the scene certainly calmed things down--for the whole
fortnight that intervened between my arrival and the girl's departure.
I don't mean to say that the endless talking did not go on at night or
that Leonora did not send me out with the girl and, in the interval,
give Edward a hell of a time. Having discovered what he wanted--that
the girl should go five thousand miles away and love him steadfastly
as people do in sentimental novels, she was determined to smash that
aspiration. And she repeated to Edward in every possible tone that the
girl did not love him; that the girl detested him for his brutality, his
overbearingness, his drinking habits. She pointed out that Edward in the
girl's eyes, was already pledged three or four deep. He was pledged to
Leonora herself, to Mrs Basil, and to the memories of Maisie Maidan and
to Florence. Edward never said anything.

Did the girl love Edward, or didn't she? I don't know. At that time I
daresay she didn't though she certainly had done so before Leonora had
got to work upon his reputation. She certainly had loved him for what
I call the public side of his record--for his good soldiering, for his
saving lives at sea, for the excellent landlord that he was and the good
sportsman. But it is quite possible that all those things came to
appear as nothing in her eyes when she discovered that he wasn't a good
husband. For, though women, as I see them, have little or no feeling of
responsibility towards a county or a country or a career--although they
may be entirely lacking in any kind of communal solidarity--they have
an immense and automatically worki