you haven't been near them for a year."

"Well, you see, the Hannays let me do what I like. They don't bother me."

"Do the Eliotts bother you?"

"They bore me. Horribly."

"And the Gardners?"

"Sometimes--a little."

"And Canon Wharton? No. I needn't ask."

He laughed. "You needn't. _He_ bores me to extinction."

"I'm sorry it is my friends who are so unfortunate."

"It's your husband who's unfortunate. He is not an intellectual person.
Nor a spiritual one, either, I'm afraid."

He looked up. Anne had finished her morsel, and her fingers played
irritably with the hand-bell at her side. Poor Majendie's abstraction had
combined with his appetite to make him deplorably slow over his dinner.
She still sat watching him, pure from appetite, in resignation that
veiled her contempt of the male hunger so incomprehensibly prolonged. He
had come to dread more than anything those attentive, sacrificial eyes.

"I'm awfully sorry," he said, "to keep you waiting."

She rang the bell. "Will you have the lamp lit in the drawing-room or the
study?"

He looked at her. There was no lamp for him in her eyes.

"Whichever you like. I think I shall go over to the Hannays', after all."

He went; and by the lamp in the drawing-room Anne sat and brooded in her
turn.

She said to herself: "It's no use my trying to keep him from them. It
only irritates him. He lets me see plainly that he prefers their society
to mine. I don't wonder. They can flatter him and kow-tow to him, and I
cannot. He can be a little god to them; and he must know what he is to
me. We haven't a thought in common--not a feeling--and he cannot bear to
feel himself inferior. As for me--if I've married beneath me, I must pay
the penalty."

But there was no penalty for her in these reflections. They satisfied
her. They were part of the curious mental process by which she justified
herself.

CHAPTER XXIII

Up to that moment when he had looked across the dinner table at Anne,
Majendie had felt secure in the bonds of his marriage. Anne's repugnance
had broken the natural tie; but up to that moment he had never doubted
that the immaterial link still held. If at times her presence was a
bodily torment, at other times he felt it as a spiritual protection. His
immense charity made allowance for all the extraordinary attitudes of
Anne. In his imagination they reduced themselves to one, the attitude of
inscrutable physical repugnance. He had accepted (as h