gone
up to London. We young bachelors, ha!"

He passed on.

Not until he had gone some way did he perceive why he had made that
announcement. It was simply because he must tell everyone, everyone;
then no one could be astonished.

He hurried on to the house to dress in time for dinner, and show all
that nothing was amiss. Seven courses would have been served him had the
sky fallen; but he ate little, and drank more claret than was his wont.
After dinner he sat in his study with the windows open, and in the
mingled day and lamp light read his wife's letter over again. As it was
with the spaniel John, so with his master--a new idea penetrated but
slowly into his long and narrow head.

She was cracked about George; she did not know what she was doing; would
soon come to her senses. It was not for him to take any steps. What
steps, indeed, could he take without confessing that Horace Pendyce had
gone too far, that Horace Pendyce was in the wrong? That had never been
his habit, and he could not alter now. If she and George chose to be
stubborn, they must take the consequences, and fend for themselves.

In the silence and the lamplight, growing mellower each minute under the
green silk shade, he sat confusedly thinking of the past. And in that
dumb reverie, as though of fixed malice, there came to him no memories
that were not pleasant, no images that were not fair. He tried to think
of her unkindly, he tried to paint her black; but with the perversity
born into the world when he was born, to die when he was dead, she came
to him softly, like the ghost of gentleness, to haunt his fancy. She
came to him smelling of sweet scents, with a slight rustling of silk,
and the sound of her expectant voice, saying, "Yes, dear?" as though
she were not bored. He remembered when he brought her first to Worsted
Skeynes thirty-four years ago, "That timid, and like a rose, but a lady
every hinch, the love!" as his old nurse had said.

He remembered her when George was born, like wax for whiteness and
transparency, with eyes that were all pupils, and a hovering smile. So
many other times he remembered her throughout those years, but never as
a woman faded, old; never as a woman of the past. Now that he had not
got her, for the first time Mr. Pendyce realised that she had not grown
old, that she was still to him "timid, and like a rose, but a lady every
hinch, the love!" And he could not bear this thought; it made him feel
so miserable