as hard.

His paramount idea was:

"She had faith in me." It was as if her faith had created the man he
was. She was passionately ambitious; so was he.

And when he kissed her wet mouth, and stroked with incredible delicacy
those streaming cheeks, he felt himself full of foreboding. But he was
proud and confident.

He took her back to Bedford Park. She carried the photograph, unwrapped;
but he ventured no comment. She went straight up to her room.

"_You_ must tell Mrs. Orgreave," she said on the stairs.

Adela made a strange remark:

"Oh! But we always intended you to marry Lois!"

PART II

CHAPTER I

THE TRIUMPH

I

George came into the conjugal bedroom. The hour was about three o'clock
in the afternoon. Lois lay on the sofa at the foot of the twin beds. It
was perhaps characteristic of her that she sincerely preferred the sofa
to her bed. Sometimes in the night, when she could not sleep, she would
get up and go sighing to the sofa, and, with nothing but a slippery
eiderdown to cover her, sleep perfectly till George arose in the
morning. Quite contentedly conventional in most matters of mere social
deportment, she often resisted purely physical conventions. A bed was
the recognized machine for slumber; hence she would instinctively choose
another machine. Also, the sofa was nearer to the ground. She liked to
be near the ground. She had welcomed with ardour the first beginnings of
the new fashion which now regularly permits ladies to sit on the
hearth-rug after a ceremonial dinner and prop their backs with cushions
or mantelpieces. Doubtless a trait of the 'cave-woman' that as a girl
she had called herself!

She was now stretched on the sofa in a luxurious and expensive ribboned
muslin negligee, untidy, pale, haggard, heavy, shapeless, the expectant
mother intensely conscious of her own body and determined to maintain
all the privileges of the exacting role which nature had for the third
time assigned to her. Little Laurencine, aged eight, and little Lois,
aged five, in their summer white, were fondling her, tumbling about her,
burying themselves in her; she reclined careless, benignant, and
acquiescent under their tiny assaults; it was at moments as though the
three were one being. When their father appeared in the doorway, she
warned them in an apparently awed tone that father was there, and that
nursey was waiting for them and that they must run off quietly. And she
kissed them with the eno