dly he used the powers the law
vests in a husband, how little he forced upon her the facts of marital
authority and wifely duty. At times he sulked, at times he affected a
cold dignity, and at times a virile anger swayed him at her unsubmissive
silences. He gave her little peace in that struggle, a struggle that
came to the edge of physical conflict. There were moments when it seemed
to her that nothing remained but that good old-fashioned connubial
institution, the tussle for the upper hand, when with a feminine horror
she felt violence shouldering her shoulder or contracting ready to grip
her wrist. Against violence she doubted her strength, was filled with a
desolating sense of yielding nerve and domitable muscle. But just short
of violence Sir Isaac's spirit failed him. He would glower and bluster,
half threaten, and retreat. It might come to that at last but at present
it had not come to that.

She could not understand why she had neither message nor sign from Susan
Burnet, but she hid that anxiety and disappointment under her general
dignity.

She spent as much time with the children as she could, and until Sir
Isaac locked up the piano she played, and was surprised to find far more
in Chopin than she had ever suspected in the days when she had acquired
a passable dexterity of execution. She found, indeed, the most curious
things in Chopin, emotional phrases, that stirred and perplexed and yet
pleased her....

The weather was very fine and open that year. A golden sunshine from
October passed on into November and Lady Harman spent many of these days
amidst the pretty things the builder from Aleham had been too hurried to
desecrate, dump, burn upon, and flatten into indistinguishable mire,
after the established custom of builders in gardens since the world
began. She would sit in the rockery where she had sat with Mr. Brumley
and recall that momentous conversation, and she would wander up the
pine-wood slopes behind, and she would spend long musing intervals among
Euphemia's perennials, thinking sometimes, and sometimes not so much
thinking as feeling the warm tendernesses of nature and the perplexing
difficulties of human life. With an amused amazement Lady Harman
reflected as she walked about the pretty borders and the little patches
of lawn and orchard that in this very place she was to have realized an
imitation of the immortal "Elizabeth" and have been wise, witty, gay,
defiant, gallant and entirely success