f it?

While sitting before the fire, gathering together these dark thoughts, I
was in such fear that I was always conscious of my husband's movements
in the adjoining room. At one moment there was the jingling of his glass
against the decanter, at another moment the smell of his cigarette
smoke. From time to time he came to the door and called to me in a sort
of husky whisper, asking if I was in bed.

"Don't keep me long, little girl."

I shuddered but made no reply.

At last he knocked softly and said he was coming in. I was still
crouching over the fire as he came up behind me.

"Not in bed yet?" he said. "Then I must put you to bed."

Before I could prevent him he had lifted me in his arms, dragged me on
to his knee and was pulling down my hair, laughing as he did so, calling
me by coarse endearing names and telling me not to fight and struggle.

But the next thing I knew I was back in the sitting-room, where I had
switched up the lights, and my husband, whose face was distorted by
passion, was blazing out at me.

"What do you mean?" he said. "I'm your husband, am I not? You are my
wife, aren't you? What did you marry for? Good heavens, can it be
possible that you don't know what the conditions of matrimony are? Is
that what comes of being brought up in a convent? But has your father
allowed you to marry without. . . . And your Aunt--what in God's name
has the woman been doing?"

I crossed towards the smaller bedroom intending to enter it, but my
husband intercepted me.

"Don't be a fool," he said, catching at my wrist. "Think of the
servants. Think what they'd say. Think what the whole island would say.
Do you want to make a laughing stock of both of us?"

I returned and sat by the table. My husband lit another cigarette.
Nervously flicking the ends off with the index finger of his left hand,
and speaking quickly, as if the words scorched his lips, he told me I
was mistaken if I supposed that he wanted a scene like this. He thought
he could spend his time better. I was equally mistaken if I imagined
that he had desired our marriage at all. Something quite different might
have happened if he could have afforded to please himself.

He had made sacrifices to marry me, too. Perhaps I had not thought of
that, but did I suppose a man of his class wanted a person like my
father for his father-in-law. And then my Aunt and my cousins--ugh!

The Bishop, too! Was it nothing that a man had been compelled to make