; her tastes had been studied,
consulted, exquisitely indulged. Anne did not want more books, nor
bronzes, nor a triptych in her drawing-room. But such things were
symbols. Their absence stood for the immense spiritual want through which
her marriage had been made void. Brooding on it, she closed her heart to
her unspiritual husband. She looked round the room with her cold
disenchanted eyes. Numberless signs of his thought and care for her
rebuked her, and rebuking, added to her misery. As her restlessness
increased, it occurred to her that she might find some satisfaction in
arranging the furniture on an entirely different plan. She rang the bell
and sent for Walter. He came, and found her sitting on the high-backed
chair whose cover had been worked by his grandmother. He smiled at the
uncomfortable figure she presented.

"So that's what you call resting, is it?"

"Walter--do you mind if I move some of the furniture in this room?"

"Move it? Of course I don't. But why?"

"Because I don't very much like the room as it is."

"Why don't you like it?" (He really wanted to know.)

"Because I don't feel comfortable in it."

"Oh, I'm so sorry, dear. Perhaps--we'd better have some new things."

"I don't want any new things."

"What do you want, then?" His voice was gentleness itself.

"Just to move all the old ones--to move everything."

She spoke with an almost infantile petulance that appealed to him as
pathetic. There was something terrible about Anne when armoured in the
cold steel of her spirituality, taking her stand upon a lofty principle.
But Anne, sitting on a high-backed chair, uttering tremulous absurdities,
Anne, protected by the unconscious humour of her own ill-temper, was
adorable. He loved this humanly captious and capricious, childishly
unreasonable Anne. And her voice was sweet even in petulance.

"My darling," he said, "you shall turn the whole house upside down if it
makes you any happier. But"--he looked round the room in quest of its
deficiencies--"what's wrong with it?"

"Nothing's wrong. You don't understand."

"No, I don't." His eye fell upon the corner where the piano once stood
that was now in Edith's room.

"There are three things," said he, "that you certainly ought to have. A
piano, and a reading-stand, and a comfortable sofa. You shall have them."

She threw back her head and closed her eyes to shut out the stupidity,
and the mockery, and the misery of that idea.

"I--don't--w