f his behaviour, lest
he should miss the peculiar irony of it. For when her fright and the
cause of her fright were gone Desmond resented Nicky's having married
her. She didn't really want anybody to marry her, and nobody but Nicky
would have dreamed of doing it.

She lay weak and pathetic in her bed for about a fortnight; and for a
little while after she was content to lie stretched out among her
cushions on the studio floor, while Nicky waited on her. But, when she
got well and came downstairs for good, Nicky saw that Desmond's weakness
and pathos had come with the baby and had gone with it. The real Desmond
was not weak, she was not pathetic. She was strong and hard and clever
with a brutal cleverness. She didn't care how much he saw. He could see
to the bottom of her nature, if he liked, and feel how hard it was. She
had no more interest in deceiving him.

She had no more interest in him at all.

She was interested in her painting again. She worked in long fits, after
long intervals of idleness. She worked with a hard, passionless
efficiency. Nicky thought her paintings were hideous and repulsive; but
he did not say so. He was not aware of the extent to which Desmond
imitated her master, Alfred Orde-Jones. He knew nothing about painting
and he had got used to the things. He had got used to Desmond, slouching
about the flat, in her sloping, slovenly grace, dressed in her queer
square jacket and straight short skirt, showing her long delicate
ankles, and her slender feet in their grey stockings and black slippers.

He was used to Desmond when she was lazy; when she sat hunched up on her
cushions and smoked one cigarette after another without a word, and
watched him sullenly. Her long, slippered feet, thrust out, pointed at
him, watching. Her long face watched him between the sleek bands of hair
and the big black bosses plaited over her ears.

The beauty of Desmond's face had gone to sleep again, stilled into
hardness by the passing of her passion. A sort of ugliness was awake
there, and it watched him.

In putting weakness and pathos away from her Desmond had parted with
two-thirds of her power. Yet the third part still served to hold him,
used with knowledge and a cold and competent economy. He resented it,
resisted it over and over again; and over and over again it conquered
resentment and resistance. It had something to do with her subtle,
sloping lines, with her blackness and her sallow whiteness, with the