ddleclass
English marriage! Ah! but I'm not so accommodating as I sound,
for you won't be a grudging giver; you're not an ascetic like
Val, there's passion in you though you've been trained to repress
it, you'll soon learn what love means as we understand it in the
sunny countries. . . . Isabel, my Isabel, when we get away from
these grey English skies you won't refuse to let me kiss
you. . ."

Isabel had ceased to listen. Without her own will a scene had sprung
up before her eyes: an imaginary scene, like one of those romantic
adventures that she had invented a thousand times before--but this
was not romantic nor was she precisely the heroine. A foreign hotel
with long corridors and many rooms: a door thoughtlessly left ajar:
and through it a glimpse of Lawrence--her husband--holding another
woman in his arms. It was lifelike, she could have counted the buds
embroidered on the girl's blouse, their rose-pink reflected in the
hot flush on Hyde's cheek and the glow in his eyes as he stooped over
her. And then the imaginary Isabel with a pain at her heart like the
stab of a knife, and a smile of inexpressible self-contempt on her
lips, noiselessly closed the door so that no one else might see what
she had seen, and left him. . . . It would all happen one day, if not
that way, some other way; and he would come to her by and by without
explanation--she was convinced that he would not lie to her--smiling,
the hot glow still on his face, a subdued air of well-being diffused
over him from head to foot--and then? The vision faded; her
clairvoyance, which had already carried her far beyond her
experience, broke down in sheer anguish. But reason took it up and
told her that she would speak to him, and that he would apologize and
she would forgive him--and that it would all happen again the next
time temptation met him in a weak hour.

Faithful? it was not in him to be faithful: with so much that was
generous and gallant, there was this vice of taste in him which
had offended her that first morning on the moor and again at
night in Laura's garden, and which now led him to make love to
her when she was under his protection and while the scent of Mrs.
Cleve's flowers still clung to his coat. And what love! if he
had simply spoken to her out of his need of her, one would not
have known how to resist, but it was he who was to be the giver,
and what he offered was the measure of what he desired--a lesson
in passion and a libe