So now--I am going to be his intellectual companion."

He was amused, just as Stanistreet had been. "I say, I can't have that,
you know. What have you got there?"

She held up her book without speaking. "Othello," of all things in the
world!

"Shakespeare? I thought so. When a woman's in a damned bad temper she
always reads Shakespeare, or Locke on the Human Understanding. Come out
of that."

Though Mrs. Nevill Tyson set her little teeth very hard, the corners of
her mouth and eyes curled with mischief. It was delicious to feel that
she could torment Nevill, to know that she had so much power. And while
she pretended to read she played with the pearl necklace she wore. It was
one shade with the white of her beautiful throat.

"Who gave you those pearls?"

She made no answer, but her hand dropped a little consciously. He had
given them to her that afternoon, remarking, with rather questionable
taste, that they were "a wedding-present for the second Mrs. Nevill
Tyson."

He leant over her chair and assailed her with questions to which no
answer came, to which no answer was possible, punctuating his periods
with kisses.

"Are you a conundrum? Or a fiend? Or a metaphysical system? And if so,
why do you wear a pink frock! Are you a young woman who prefers a dead
poet to a living husband? Are you a young woman at all? Or only a dear
little, sweet little, pink little strawberry iceberg?"

He lay down on the sofa as if overcome by unutterable fatigue. "Just as
you like," he murmured faintly. "You'll be sorry for this some day.
Shakespeare is immortal. I, most unfortunately, am not."

He got up and threw the window open. He ramped about the room,
soliloquizing as he went. Never, even in the last days of their
engagement, had she seen him so restless. (But she was not going to speak
yet; not she!) He stopped before the chimney-piece; it was covered with
ridiculous objects, the things that please a child: there were Swiss
cow-bells and stags carved in wood, Chinese idols that wagged their
heads, little images of performing cats, teacups, a whole shelf full of
toys. Not one of them but had some minute fragment of his wife's
personality adhering to it. He remembered the insane impulse that came
upon him last year to smash them, sweep the lot of them on to the floor.
To-night he could have kissed them, cried over them. "T-t-t-tt! What
affecting absurdity!" That was the way he went on. And now he sat down
by her writing-ta