d
it was. Quickly undressing she lay down and closed her eyes. A
succession of images passed with processional steadiness before her
mind; the carriage in the Forest of Fontainebleau and Tante in it
looking at her; Tante in the hotel at Fontainebleau, her arm around the
little waif, saying: "But it is a Norse child; her name and her hair and
her eyes;" Tante's dreadful face as she tottered back to Karen's arms
from the sight at the lake-edge; Tante that evening lying white and
sombre on her pillows with eyelids pressed down as if on tears, saying:
"Do they wish to take my child, too, from me?"

Then came the other face, the new face; like a sword; thrusting among
the sacred visions. Consciously she saw her husband's face now, as she
had often, with a half wilful unconsciousness, seen it, looking at
Tante--ah, a fierce resentment flamed up in her at last with the
unavoidable clearness of her vision--looking at Tante with a courteous
blankness that cloaked hostility; with cold curiosity; with mastered
irony, suspicion, dislike. He was, then, a man not generous, not large
and wise of heart, a man without the loving humour that would have
enabled him to see past the defects and flaws of greatness, nor with the
heart and mind to recognize and love it when he saw it. He was petty,
too, and narrow, and arrogantly sure of his own small measures. Her
memories heaped themselves into the overwhelming realisation. She was
married to a man who was hostile to what--until he had come--had been
the dearest thing in her life. She had taken to her heart something that
killed its very pulse. How could she love a man who looked such things
at Tante--who thought such things of Tante? How love him without
disloyalty to the older tie? Already her forbearance, her hiding from
him of her fear, had been disloyalty, a cowardly acquiescence in
something that, from the first hint of it, she should openly have
rebelled against. Slow flames of shame and anger burned her. How could
she not hate him? But how could she not love him? He was part of her
life, as unquestionably, as indissolubly, as Tante.

Then, the visions crumbling, the flames falling, a chaos of mere feeling
overwhelmed her. It was as though her blood were running backward,
knotting itself in clots of darkness and agony. He had sent her away
unlovingly--punishing her for her fidelity. Her love for Tante destroyed
his love for her. He must have known her pain; yet he could speak like
t