she cries so easily. She cries sometimes till she's sick."

Mrs. Eliott's face had grown white; she trembled, and was dumb before the
anguish of Anne's face.

But it was Anne who rose, and put her arms about the childless woman, and
kissed and comforted her.

It was as if she had said: Thank God you never had one.

CHAPTER XXXI

The rumour which was going the round of the clubs in due time reached
Lady Cayley through the Ransomes. It roused in her many violent and
conflicting emotions.

She sat trembling in the Ransomes' drawing-room. Mrs. Ransome had just
asked whether there was anything in it; because if there was, she, Mrs.
Ransome, washed her hands of her. She intimated that it would take a good
deal of washing to get Sarah off her hands.

Sarah had unveiled the face of horror, the face of outraged virtue, and
the wrath and writhing of propriety wounded in the uncertain, quivering,
vital spot. During the unveiling Dick Ransome had come in. He wanted
to know if Topsy had been bullying poor Toodles. Whereupon Topsy wept
feebly, and poor Toodles had a moment of monstrous calm.

She wanted to get it quite clear, to make no mistake. They might as well
give her the details. Majendie had left his wife, had he? Well, she
wasn't surprised at that. The wonder was that, having married her, he had
stuck to her so long. He had left his wife, and was living at Scarby, was
he, with her? Well, she only wanted to get all the details clear.

At this Sarah fell into a fit of laughter very terrifying to see. Since
her own sister wouldn't take her word for it, she supposed she'd have to
prove that it was not so.

And, under the horror of her virtue and respectability, there heaved a
dull, dumb fury, born of her memory that it once was, her belief that
it might have been again, and her knowledge that it was not so. She
trembled, shaken by the troubling of the fire that ran underground,
the immense, unseen, unliberated, primeval fire. She was no longer a
creature of sophistries, hypocrisies, and wiles. She was the large woman
of the simple earth, welded by the dark, unspiritual flame.

Dick Ransome turned on his sister-in-law a pale, puffy face in which two
little dark eyes twinkled with a shrewd, gross humour. Nothing could
possibly have pleased Dick Ransome more than an exhibition of indignant
virtue, as achieved by Sarah. He knew a great deal more about Sarah than
Mrs. Ransome knew, or than Sarah knew herself. To D