grovel among her
pillows, burying her face and half stifling herself lest her sobs should
be heard. Her feeling for her husband had become one of terror and
repulsion. She was almost more afraid of his patronising, affectionate
moments than she was of his temper.

His conjugal condescensions made her feel vaguely--without knowing
why--as if she were some lower order of little animal.

American women, he said, had no conception of wifely duties and
affection. He had a great deal to say on the subject of wifely duty.
It was part of her duty as a wife to be entirely satisfied with his
society, and to be completely happy in the pleasure it afforded her. It
was her wifely duty not to talk about her own family and palpitatingly
expect letters by every American mail. He objected intensely to this
letter writing and receiving, and his mother shared his prejudices.

"You have married an Englishman," her ladyship said. "You have put it
out of his power to marry an Englishwoman, and the least consideration
you can show is to let New York and Nine-hundredth street remain upon
the other side of the Atlantic and not insist on dragging them into
Stornham Court."

The Dowager Lady Anstruthers was very fine in her picture of her mental
condition, when she realised, as she seemed periodically to do, that it
was no longer possible for her son to make a respectable marriage with
a woman of his own nation. The unadorned fact was that both she and
Sir Nigel were infuriated by the simplicity which made Rosalie slow in
comprehending that it was proper that the money her father allowed
her should be placed in her husband's hands, and left there with no
indelicate questioning. If she had been an English girl matters would
have been made plain to her from the first and arranged satisfactorily
before her marriage. Sir Nigel's mother considered that he had played
the fool, and would not believe that New York fathers were such touchy,
sentimental idiots as not to know what was expected of them.

They wasted no time, however, in coming to the point, and in a measure
it was the vicaress who aided them. Not she entirely, however.

Since her mother-in-law's first mention of a possible son whose wife
would eventually thrust her from her seat at the head of the table,
Rosalie had several times heard this son referred to. It struck her
that in England such things seemed discussed with more freedom than in
America. She had never heard a young woman's