metimes remembered what she
expected of these volumes, what _plein air_ sensations, or what profound
plunges, and did not quite like her indifference as to whether her
expectations were fulfilled. She discovered herself intellectually
jaded--there had been tiring excursions--and took to daily rides which
carried her far out among the rice-fields, and gave her sound nights to
sustain the burden of her dreaming days. She had ideas about her
situation; she believed she lived outside of it. At all events, she took
a line; the new Arab was typical, and there were other measures which
she arranged deliberately with the idea that she was making a physical
fight. Life might weigh one down with a dragging ball and chain, but one
could always measure the strength of one's opinions against these
things. She made it her sorry and remorseless task to separate from her
impulses those that she found lacking in philosophy, hinting of the
foolish woman, and to turn a cruel heel upon them. She stripped her
meditations of all colour and atmosphere; she would not accept from her
grief the luxury of a rag to wrap herself in. If this gave her a
skeleton to live with, she had what gratification there was in observing
that it was anatomically as it should be. The result that one saw from
the outside was chiefly a look of delicate hardness, of tissue a little
frayed, but showing a quality in the process. We may hope that some
unconfessed satisfaction was derivable from her continued reception of
Duff's confidences, her unflinching readiness to consult with him;
granting the analytic turn we may almost suppose it. Starvation is so
monotonous a misery that a gift of personal diagnosis might easily lend
attraction to poisoned food as an alternative, if one may be permitted a
melodramatic simile in a case which Alicia kept conventional enough. She
did not even abate the usual number of Duff's invitations to dinner,
when there was certainly nothing to repay her for regarding him across a
gulf of flowers and silver and a tide of conversation about the season's
paper-chasing except the impoverished complexion which people acquire
who sit much in Bentinck street, desirous and unsatisfied.

It may very well be that she regretted her behaviour in this respect,
for it was effectively after one of these parties that Surgeon-Major
Livingstone, pressing upon his departing guest in the hall the usual
whiskey and soda, found it necessary instead to give him ano