be, if only
for a day. On reading the letter over, its tone displeased him. It was
quite pathetic: it sounded like a cry from prison. "I can't send him
such nonsense," he thought, and wrote again. But phrase it as he would
the letter always suggested that he was unhappy. "What's wrong?" he
wondered. "I could write anything I wanted to him once." So he scrawled
"Come!" on a post-card. But even this seemed too serious. The post-card
followed the letters, and Agnes found them all in the waste-paper
basket.

Then she said, "I've been thinking--oughtn't you to ask Mr. Ansell over?
A breath of sea air would do the poor thing good."

There was no difficulty now. He wrote at once, "My dear Stewart, We both
so much wish you could come over." But the invitation was refused. A
little uneasy he wrote again, using the dialect of their past intimacy.
The effect of this letter was not pathetic but jaunty, and he felt
a keen regret as soon as it slipped into the box. It was a relief to
receive no reply.

He brooded a good deal over this painful yet intangible episode. Was
the pain all of his own creating? or had it been produced by something
external? And he got the answer that brooding always gives--it was both.
He was morbid, and had been so since his visit to Cadover--quicker to
register discomfort than joy. But, none the less, Ansell was definitely
brutal, and Agnes definitely jealous. Brutality he could understand,
alien as it was to himself. Jealousy, equally alien, was a harder
matter. Let husband and wife be as sun and moon, or as moon and sun.
Shall they therefore not give greeting to the stars? He was willing to
grant that the love that inspired her might be higher than his own. Yet
did it not exclude them both from much that is gracious? That dream of
his when he rode on the Wiltshire expanses--a curious dream: the lark
silent, the earth dissolving. And he awoke from it into a valley full of
men.

She was jealous in many ways--sometimes in an open humorous fashion,
sometimes more subtly, never content till "we" had extended our
patronage, and, if possible, our pity. She began to patronize and pity
Ansell, and most sincerely trusted that he would get his fellowship.
Otherwise what was the poor fellow to do? Ridiculous as it may seem, she
was even jealous of Nature. One day her husband escaped from Ilfracombe
to Morthoe, and came back ecstatic over its fangs of slate, piercing an
oily sea. "Sounds like an hippopotamus," s