ace to catch it more
perfectly.

Janet had not mentioned the matter to him again; indeed,
she had hardly thought of it. Her whole nature was absorbed
in her fight with herself, in the struggle for self-control,
which had ceased to come to the surface of her life at
intervals, and had now become constant and supreme with
her. Kendal had made it harder for her lately by continually
talking of Elfrida. He brought his interest in her to
Janet to discuss as he naturally brought everything that
touched him to her, and Janet, believing it to be a
lover's pleasure, could not forbid him. When he criticised
Elfrida, Janet fancied it was to hear her warm defence,
which grew oddly reckless in her anxiety to hide the
bitterness that tinged it.

"Otherwise," she permitted herself to reflect, "he is
curiously just in his analysis of her--for a man," and
hated the thought for its touch of disloyalty.

Knowing Elfrida as she thought she knew her, Kendal's
talk wounded her once for herself and twice for him. He
was going on blindly, confidently, trusting, Janet thought
bitterly, to his own sweetness of nature, to his comeliness
and the fineness of his sympathies--who had ever refused
him anything yet? And only to his hurt, to his repulse--from
the point of view of sentiment, to his ruin. For it did
not seem possible to Janet that a hopeless passion for
a being like Elfrida Bell could result in anything but
collapse. Whenever he came to Kensington Square, and he
came often, she went down to meet him with a quaking
heart, and sought his face nervously for the haggard,
broken look which should mean that he had asked Elfrida
to marry him and been artistically refused. Always she
looked in vain; indeed, Kendal's spirits were so uniformly
like a schoolboy's that once or twice she asked herself,
with sudden terror, whether Elfrida had deceived
her--whether it might not be otherwise between them,
recognizing then, with infinite humiliation, how much
worse that would be. She took to working extravagantly
hard, and Elfrida noticed with distinct pleasure how much
warmer her manner had grown, and in how many pretty ways
she showed her enthusiasm. Janet was such a conquest!
Once when Kendal seemed to Janet on the point of asking
her what she thought of his chances, she went to a
florist's in the High, and sent Elfrida a pot of snowy
chrysanthemums, after which she allowed herself to refrain
from seeing her for a week. Her talk with her fat