no further understanding, no
closer intimacy.

To Anne's mind, her husband's attitude to her was perfect. The passion
that had been her fear had left him. He waited on her hand and foot, with
humble, heart-rending devotion. He let her see that he adored her with
discretion, at a distance, as a divinely, incomprehensibly high and holy
thing.

Her household life had simplified itself. Her days passed in noiseless,
equable procession. Many hours had been given back to her empty after
Edith's death. She had filled them with interests outside her home, with
visiting the poor in the district round All Souls, with evening classes
for shop-girls, with "Rescue" work. Not an hour of her day was idle. At
the end of the three years Mrs. Majendie was known in Scale by her broad
charities and by her saintly life.

She had fallen away a little from her friends in Thurston Square. In
three years Fanny Eliott and her circle had grown somewhat unreal to her.
She had been aware of their inefficiency before. There had been a time
when she felt that Mrs. Eliott's eminence had become a little perilous.
She herself had placed her on it, and held her there by a somewhat
fatiguing effort of the will to believe. She had been partly (though she
did not know it) the dupe of Mrs. Eliott's delight in her, of all the
sweet and dangerous ministrations of their mutual vanities. Mrs. Eliott
had been uplifted by Anne's preposterously grave approval. Anne had been
ravished by her own distinction as the audience of Fanny Eliott's loftier
and profounder moods. There could be no criticism of these heights and
depths. To have depreciated Fanny Eliott's rarity by a shade would have
been to call in question her own.

But all this had ceased long ago, when she married Walter Majendie, and
his sister became her dearest friend. Fanny Eliott had always looked on
Edith Majendie as her rival; retreating a little ostentatiously before
her formidable advance. There should have been no rivalry, for there had
been no possible ground of comparison. Neither could Edith Majendie be
said to have advanced. The charm of Edith, or rather, her pathetic claim,
was that she never could have advanced at all. To Anne's mind, from the
first, there had been no choice between Edith, lying motionless on her
sofa by the window, and Fanny at large in the drawing-rooms of her
acquaintances, scattering her profuse enthusiasms, revolving in her
intellectual round, the prisoner of her own