"

"Tell me everything. All she did after I went upstairs."

Grimly she remembered the former rich traffic of their minds.
Henceforward he would do nothing but ask that question; she would do
nothing but answer it. It was the third time she had told this story in
the twelve hours. "She was as bright as could be. Talked of going to a
theatre, but said you cared for a good music-hall as much as
anything...." Her voice was thin, as liars' voices are. Surely he must
notice it and feel distaste. Oh, fatal Marion! Even in her complete and
final abnegation of her forcefulness she had used such an excess of
force that the world about her was shattered. For Ellen perceived that
never again would the relationship of Richard and herself be the perfect
crystal sphere that it had been before they came here, but must always,
till they died, be flawed with insincerity. She would never dare tell
him how, thought over, those trivial plans for the next day's pleasuring
were revealed, themselves, as devices of a tremendous hammering
nobility; how, seen with the intelligence of memory, the face at the
window had been the greasy mask of a swimmer in the icy waters of the
ultimate fear; how there had stood on the lawn for a long time what had
seemed a loiterer, but was in truth a pillar of love. If she let his
inherited excessiveness learn this he would go mad; and he would hate
her for not reading these signs when they had been given her. All her
life she would have to keep silence concerning something of which he
would speak repeatedly. She would become queer and jerky with strained
inhibitions ... charmless.... Perhaps he would go from her to unburdened
women....

"Perhaps you're right," he said wearily when she had finished; "maybe it
was an accident." He began to eat again, but soon pushed away his plate
and stood up looking down on the hearth. "Where did she sit? Which
chair?"

"Yon, at your hand."

He drooped over it, caressing the velvet cover. "Will I ever get him out
of this house, where everything will always remind him of her?" she
wondered savagely. Really Marion was magnificent, but she was very
upsetting. She was like a cardinal in full robes falling downstairs. And
for what inadequate reason she had caused all this commotion! Just
because her two sons quarrelled! She could have prevented that easily
enough if she had brought them up properly and skelped them when they
needed it. Ellen curled her lip as she watched him s