but giving up. Let that be seen as a subtle, a sublimated form of
giving, and the lesson is learned. But practice makes perfect. You
must never relax the rein. He never did. There was all the ingenuity
and patience of a woman about him.

By this time, after twelve years and more of marriage, they were very
good friends; or, why not say, old acquaintances? There are two kinds
of crystallisation in love affairs, with all respect to M. de
Stendhal. One kind hardens the surfaces without any decorative
effect. There are no facets visible, no angles to catch the light. In
the case of the Macartney marriage I suspect this to have been the
only kind--a kind of callosity, protective and numbing. The less they
were thrown together, she found, the better friends they were. At home
they were really no more than neighbours; abroad she was Mrs.
Macartney, and never would dine out without him. She was
old-fashioned; her friends called her a prude. But she was not at all
unhappy. She liked to think of Lancelot, she said, and to be quiet.
And really, as Miss Bacchus (a terrible old woman) once said, Lucy was
so little of a married woman that she was perfectly innocent.

But she was one-and-thirty, and as sweet and pretty a woman as you
would wish to see. She had the tender, dragging smile of a Luini
Madonna; grave, twilight eyes, full of compassionate understanding;
very dark eyebrows, very long lashes, like the fringe of rain over a
moorland landscape. She had a virginal shape, and liked her clothes to
cling about her knees. Long fingers, longish, thin feet. But her
humorous sense was acute and very delightful, and all children loved
her. Such charms as these must have been as obvious to herself as they
were to everybody else. She had a modest little court of her own.
Francis Lingen was almost admittedly in love with her; one of
Macartney's friends. But she accepted her riches soberly, and did not
fret that they must be so hoarded. If, by moments, as she saw herself,
or looked at herself, in the glass, a grain of bitterness surged up in
her throat, that all this fair seeming could not be put out to
usury--! well, she put it to herself very differently, not at all in
words, but in narrowed scrutinising eyes, half-turns of the pretty
head, a sigh and lips pressed together. There had been--nay, there
was--Lancelot, her darling. That was usufruct; but usury was a
different thing. There had never been what you would call, or Miss
Bacchus