he saw her round white
throat. "Why should I condescend to get round you, as you call it?"

"That's it!" he shouted angrily. "That's the word!" He rose and knocked
his pipe against the stove. "You're too damned free with your
condescension, and I'm sick of it." He left the kitchen angrily, and two
minutes later she heard the distant banging of the garden door.

She wanted to run after him, for she was afraid of the impulses of his
anger. She felt a dreadful need to conciliate, for no other reason than
his body's greater strength, but she let him go, and though for several
days she did not see him, she had no sense of liberty. He would come
back, she knew, and she found herself planning unworthy little shifts,
arranging how she would manage him if he did this or that, losing her
birthright of belief that man and woman could meet and traffic honestly
together. They could not do it, she found, when either used base
weapons: she, her guile, or he, his strength; but if he used his
strength, how could she save herself from using guile? She had to use
it, and she clung fiercely to it, though she knew that, at last, it
would be wrested from her.

* * * * *

In these days of his absence, there were hours when she wandered
ceaselessly through the house, urged by the pride which refused
allegiance to this man, tortured by her love for Zebedee and the pain
she had to give him, hunted by the thought that George was making for
himself a place in the circle where she kept her pensioners. Each time
that he looked at her with longing, though she shrank, she gave her
ready pity, and when he walked away into the night, her heart went after
him unwillingly. Worse than all, she knew she would not always see him
as a pensioner. Far off and indistinct, like a gallows seen on a distant
hill, she spied the day when she might own a kind of need of him; she
had to love those who loved her enough, and his strength, the very
limits of his mind, would some day hold her. But she would not let these
thoughts properly take shape: they were vague menaces, and they chased
her through Mr. Pinderwell's sparsely-furnished rooms. She was glad that
Zebedee had never been a pensioner; he had always given more than he had
asked. His had not been an attitude of pleading, and she could not
remember once seeing an appeal in his eyes. They had always been quick
on her face and busy with herself, and her pride in him was mixed with