or
conscience in the matter.

It was made clear to Nina that she was too happy for that, too much in
love with Owen, too much aware that Owen was in love with her, though
their fineness saved them both from any flagrant evidences of their
state. They evaded as by a common understanding the smallest allusion to
themselves and their affairs. They suggested charmingly that what
excited them was the amazing performance of their friends, of Tanqueray,
of Jane, of Nina. In her smiling protest that she no longer counted
Laura gave the effect of serene detachment from the contest. She
surveyed it from an inaccessible height, turning very sweetly and
benignly from her bliss. She was not so remote, she seemed to say, but
that she remembered. She knew how absorbing those ardent rivalries could
be. Nina she evidently regarded as absorbed fatally, beyond recall; and
no wonder, when for her the game was so magnificent. If Nina cared for
the applause of a blessed spirit, it was hers.

It seemed to Nina's morbid sense that Laura overdid it; that the two of
them closed round her by a common impulse and a common fear, that they
rushed to her wild head to turn her to her course and keep her there. In
every word there was a sting for her, the flick of the lash that drove
her on.

Nina was then aware that she hated Laura. The hatred was not active in
her presence; it made no movement towards its object; it lay somewhere
in the dark; it tossed on a hot bed, sleepless in an incurable distress.

And Laura remained unconscious. She took her presently up-stairs to her
room, Owen's room. It was all they had, she said. Nina held her head
very straight, trying hard not to see Owen's coat that hung behind the
door, or his big boots all in a row beside Laura's little ones. Her face
in the glass met her with a challenge to her ironic humour. It demanded
why she could not face that innocent juxtaposition, after all she _had_
stood, after all that they were evidently prepared to make her stand.
But she was not to be moved by any suggestions of her face. She owed it
a grudge; it showed so visibly her murkiness. Sun-burnt, coarsened a
little by the wind, with the short, virile, jutting bridge of the nose,
the hot eyes, the mouth's ironic twist, it was the face not of a woman
but a man, or rather of a temperament, a face foredoomed to disaster.
She accentuated its effect by the masculine fashion of her clothes and
the way she swept back her hair sidel