d herself with every accustomed ceremony, arranging
each article of attire, including the fine frock left on the bed,
carefully in its place, as is meet in a chamber where tidiness depends
on the loyal cooperation of two persons, but through her tears.
She had slipped sobbing into bed. The other bed was empty, and its
emptiness seemed sinister to her. Would it ever be occupied again?
Impossible that it should ever be occupied again! Its rightful
occupant was immeasurably far off, along miles of passages, down
leagues of stairs, separated by impregnable doors, in another
universe, the universe of the ground floor. Of course she might have
sprung up, put on her enchanting dressing-gown, tripped down a few
steps in a moment of time, and peeped in at the parlour door--just
peeped in, in that magic ribboned peignoir, and glanced--and the whole
planet would have been reborn. But she could not. If the salvation of
the human race had depended on it, she could not--partly because she
was a native of the Five Towns, where such things are not done, and no
doubt partly because she was just herself.

She was now more grieved than angry with Louis. He had been wrong; he
was a foolish, unreliable boy--but he was a boy. Whereas she was his
mother, and ought to have known better. Yes, she had become his mother
in the interval. For herself she experienced both pity and anger. What
angered her was her clumsiness. Why had she lost her temper and her
head? She saw clearly how she might have brought him round to her view
with a soft phrase, a peculiar inflection, a tiny appeal, a caress,
a mere dimpling of the cheek. She saw him revolving on her little
finger.... She knew all things now because she was so old. And then
suddenly she was bathing luxuriously in self-pity, and young and
imperious, and violently resentful of the insult which he had put upon
her--an insult which recalled the half-forgotten humiliations of her
school-days, when loutish girls had baptized her with the name of a
vegetable.... And then, again suddenly, she deeply desired that Louis
should come upstairs and bully her.

She attached a superstitious and terrible importance to the tragical
episode in the parlour because it was their first quarrel as husband
and wife. True, she had stormed at him before their engagement, but
even then he had kept intact his respect for her, whereas now, a
husband, he had shamed her. The breach, she knew, could never be
closed. She had on