in the very
earliest days of their marriage had been an intimation of a way of
looking at things that to her was entirely and exasperatingly
inexplicable; and since then, increasingly year by year, her
understanding had failed to follow him. He had retired farther and
farther into himself. He lived in his mind, and she could by no means
penetrate into his mind. His ideas about things, his attitude towards
things, were wholly and exasperatingly incomprehensible to her.

"It's like," she had once complained to her father, "it's like having a
foreigner in the house."

Things, in her expression, "went on" in his mind, and she could not
understand what went on in his mind, and it exasperated her to know they
were going on and that she could not understand them.

"I--don't--believe--I--would." Characteristic, typical expression of
those processes of his mind that she could not understand! And then the
reason: "I wouldn't because I'd have known perfectly well that you'd
have thought it--funny."

And, exasperation on exasperation's head, he was right. She did think it
funny; and by his very reply--for she knew him well enough, so
exasperatingly well, to know that this was complete sincerity, complete
truth--he proved to her that it was not really funny but merely
something she could not understand. Robbery of her fancy, her hope that
it was something definite against him, something justifiably incentive
of resentment, of jealousy!

It was as if he had said, "You can't understand a letter like this.
There's nothing in it to understand. And that's just what you can't
understand. Look here, you see my head. I'm in there. You can't come in.
You don't know how to. I can't tell you how to. Nobody could tell you.
And you wouldn't know what to make of it if you did get in."

Exasperating. Insufferable. Insupportable!

She could not express her feelings in words. She expressed them in
action. She arose violently and left the room. The whole of her emotions
she put into the slam of the door behind her. The ornaments shivered. A
cup sprang off a bracket and dashed itself to pieces on the floor.

XIII

Sabre regarded the broken cup much as Sir Isaac Newton presumably
regarded the fallen apple. He "worked back" from the cup through the
events of the day, and through the events of the day returned to the
cup. It interested him to find that the fragments on the floor were as
logical a result of the movements of the day as they w