seemingly
unfinished houses. Then a sort of boulevard where bourgeois families
were taking the Sunday afternoon walk: stout papas, stout, pallid mamas
in rather cheap black fur, little girls very much dressed, and long lads
in short socks and round sailor caps, ribbons fluttering. Alien they
felt, alien, alien, as a bourgeois crowd always does, but particularly
a foreign, Sunday-best bourgeois crowd. Aaron wandered and wandered,
finding the tram terminus and trying blank, unfinished street after
street. He had a great disinclination to ask his way.

At last he recognised the bank and the little stream of water that ran
along the street side. So he was back in time for tea. A hospital nurse
was there, and two other strange women. Arthur played the part of host.
Sir William came in from a walk with the dogs, but retired to his room
without taking tea.

And so the evening fell. Aaron sat in the hall at some distance from the
fire, which burned behind its wrought iron gates. He was tired now with
all his impressions, and dispirited. He thought of his wife and children
at home: of the church-bells ringing so loudly across the field beyond
his garden end: of the dark-clad people trailing unevenly across the two
paths, one to the left, one to the right, forking their way towards the
houses of the town, to church or to chapel: mostly to chapel. At this
hour he himself would be dressed in his best clothes, tying his bow,
ready to go out to the public house. And his wife would be resenting his
holiday departure, whilst she was left fastened to the children.

Rather tired and dispirited in this alien place, he wondered if he
wished himself back. But the moment he actually _realised_ himself
at home, and felt the tension of barrenness which it meant, felt the
curious and deadly opposition of his wife's will against his own nature,
the almost nauseating ache which it amounted to, he pulled himself
together and rejoiced again in his new surroundings. Her will, her will,
her terrible, implacable, cunning will! What was there in the female
will so diabolical, he asked himself, that it could press like a flat
sheet of iron against a man all the time? The female will! He realised
now that he had a horror of it. It was flat and inflexible as a sheet
of iron. But also it was cunning as a snake that could sing treacherous
songs.

Of two people at a deadlock, he always reminded himself, there is not
one only wholly at fault. Both must b