ingenious untruth came from her without the
slightest effort. It seemed to invent itself.

"Well," said Louis, "I don't happen to want any supper." His accent
was slightly but definitely inimical. He perceived that he had an
advantage, and he decided to press it.

Rachel also perceived this, and she thought resentfully: "How cruel
he is! How mean he is!" She hated and loved him simultaneously. She
foresaw that peace must be preceded by the horrors of war, and she was
discouraged. Though determined that he should not escape from the room
unreconciled, she was ready to inflict dreadful injuries on him, as
he on her. They now regarded each other askance, furtively, as dire
enemies.

Louis, being deficient in common sense, thought of nothing but
immediate victory. He well knew that, in case of trouble with Jim
Horrocleave, he might be forced to humble himself before his wife, and
that present arrogance would only intensify future difficulties. Also,
he had easily divined that the woman opposite to him was a softer
Rachel than the one he had left, and very ready for pacific
compromise. Nevertheless, in his polite, patient way, he would
persist in keeping the attitude of an ill-used saint with a most
clear grievance. And more than this, he wanted to appear absolutely
consistent, even in coming home again. Could he have recalled the
precise terms of his letter, he would have contrived to interpret them
so as to include the possibility of his return that night. He fully
intended to be the perfect male.

Drawing his cigarette-case and match-box from his hip pocket, by means
of the silver cable which attached them to his person, he carefully
lit a cigarette and rose to put the spent match in the fire. While at
the hearth he looked at his plastered face in the glass, critically
and dispassionately, as though he had nothing else in the world to do.
Then his eye caught some bits of paper in the fender--fragments of his
letter which Rachel had cast into the fire and on to the hearth. He
stooped, picked up one white piece, gazed at it, dropped it, picked up
another, gazed at it, dropped it fastidiously.

"Hm!" he said faintly.

Then he stood again at his full height and blew smoke profusely about
the mantelpiece. He was very close to Rachel, and above her. He
could see the top of her bent, mysterious head; he could see all the
changing curves of her breast as she breathed. He knew intimately
her frock, the rings on her hand, t