. "If you had stayed in the
church," she said afterwards, "you might have helped to alter such
things as that."

At the time he had no answer.

"But," he said presently as they went back in the tube to their modest
Bloomsbury hotel, "if I had stayed in the church I should never have
realized things like that."

(4)

But it does no justice to Lady Ella to record these two unavoidable
expressions of regret without telling also of the rallying courage with
which she presently took over the task of resettling herself and her
stricken family. Her husband's change of opinion had fallen upon her out
of a clear sky, without any premonition, in one tremendous day. In one
day there had come clamouring upon her, with an effect of revelation
after revelation, the ideas of drugs, of heresy and blasphemy, of an
alien feminine influence, of the entire moral and material breakdown of
the man who had been the centre of her life. Never was the whole world
of a woman so swiftly and comprehensively smashed. All the previous
troubles of her life seemed infinitesimal in comparison with any single
item in this dismaying debacle. She tried to consolidate it in the idea
that he was ill, "disordered." She assured herself that he would
return from Hunstanton restored to health and orthodoxy, with all
his threatenings of a resignation recalled; the man she had loved and
trusted to succeed in the world and to do right always according to her
ideas. It was only with extreme reluctance that she faced the fact that
with the fumes of the drug dispelled and all signs of nervous exhaustion
gone, he still pressed quietly but resolutely toward a severance from
the church. She tried to argue with him and she found she could not
argue. The church was a crystal sphere in which her life was wholly
contained, her mind could not go outside it even to consider a
dissentient proposition.

While he was at Hunstanton, every day she had prayed for an hour, some
days she had prayed for several hours, in the cathedral, kneeling upon
a harsh hassock that hurt her knees. Even in her prayers she could not
argue nor vary. She prayed over and over again many hundreds of times:
"Bring him back, dear Lord. Bring him back again."

In the past he had always been a very kind and friendly mate to her, but
sometimes he had been irritable about small things, especially during
his seasons of insomnia; now he came back changed, a much graver man,
rather older in his manner,