again. Ever.
Mrs. Pembrose go! Why! You ain't worthy to touch the heel of her shoe!
Mrs. Pembrose!"

He gathered together all his forces and suddenly expelled with rousing
force the word he had already applied to her on the day of the
intercepted letter.

He found it seemed great satisfaction in the sound and taste of it. He
repeated it thrice. "Zut," cried the doctor, "Sssh!"

Then Sir Isaac intimated his sense that calm was imperative. "You send
for Crappen," he said with a quiet earnestness.

She had become now so used to terms of infamy during the last year or
so, so accustomed to forgive them as part of his suffering, that she
seemed not to hear the insult.

"Do you want him at once?" she asked. "Shall I telegraph?"

"Want him at once!" He dropped his voice to a whisper. "Yes, you
fool--yes. Telegraph. (Phew.) Telegraph.... I mustn't get angry, you
know. You--telegraph."

He became suddenly still. But his eyes were active with hate.

She glanced at the doctor, then moved to the door.

"I will send a telegram," she said, and left him still malignant.

She closed the door softly and walked down the long cool passage towards
her own room....

Sec.10

She had to be patient. She had to be patient. This sort of thing had to
go on from crisis to crisis. It might go on for years. She could see no
remedy and no escape.

What else was there to do but be patient? It was all amazing unjust, but
to be a married woman she was beginning to understand is to be outside
justice. It is autocracy. She had once imagined otherwise, and most of
her life had been the slow unlearning of that initial error. She had
imagined that the hostels were hers simply because he had put it in that
way. They had never been anything but his, and now it was manifest he
would do what he liked with his own. The law takes no cognizance of the
unwritten terms of a domestic reconciliation.

She sat down at the writing-table the hotel management had improvised
for her.

She rested her chin on her hand and tried to think out her position. But
what was there to think out, seeing that nature and law and custom have
conspired together to put women altogether under the power of jealous
and acquisitive men?

She drew the telegram form towards her.

She was going to write a telegram that she knew would bring Crappen
headlong--to disinherit her absolutely. And--it suddenly struck her--her
husband had trusted her to write it. She was going to