the pressure of his own love for her, the loveliness,
the romance that she so supremely personified for him, surged too
strongly against the barrier of her mute, unanswering face, for him to
feel temperately and weigh fairly. There was a lack in her, and because
of it she hurt him thus cruelly.

They met next morning over a mutual misinterpretation, and, with a sense
of mingled discord and relief, found themselves kissing and smiling as
if nothing had happened. Pride sustained them; the hope that, since the
other seemed so unconscious, a hurt dealt so unconsciously need not, for
pride's sake, be resented; the fear that explanation or protest might
emphasise estrangement. The easiest thing to do was to go on acting as
if nothing had happened. Karen poured out his coffee and questioned him
about the latest political news. He helped her to eggs and bacon and
took an interest in her letters.

And since it was easiest to begin so, it was easiest so to go on. The
routine of their shared life blurred for them the sharp realisations of
the night. But while the fact that such suffering had come to them was
one that could, perhaps, be lived down, the fact that they did not speak
of it spread through all their life with a strange, new savour.

Karen went to her ducal week-end; but she did not, when she came back
from it, regale her husband with her usual wealth of detailed
description. She could no longer assume the air of happy confidence
where Tante and her doings with Tante were concerned. That air of
determined cheerfulness, that pretence that nothing was really the
matter and that Tante and Gregory were bound to get on together if she
took it for granted that they would, had broken down. There was relief
for Gregory, though relief of a chill, grey order, in seeing that Karen
had accepted the fact that he and Tante were not to get on. Yet he
smarted from the new sense of being shut out from her life.

It was he who assumed the air; he who pretended that nothing was the
matter. He questioned her genially about the visit, and Karen answered
all his questions as genially. Yes; it had been very nice; the great
house sometimes very beautiful and sometimes very ugly; the beauty
seemed, in a funny way, almost as accidental as the ugliness. The people
had been very interesting to look at; so many slender pretty women;
there were no fat women and no ugly women at all, or, if they were, they
contrived not to look it. It all seemed p