e attention
to those words than to any others spoken during that hour's settlement
of his fate. True, he received them standing, as is the custom, fronting
the image of Justice, from whose lips they came. But by no single
gesture did he let any one see the dumb depths of his soul. If life had
taught him nothing else, it had taught him never to express himself.
Mute as any bullock led into the slaughtering-house, with something of a
bullock's dulled and helpless fear in his eyes, he passed down and away
between his jailers. And at once the professional noises rose, and the
professional rhapsodists, hunching their gowns, swept that little lot
of papers into their pink tape, and, turning to their neighbors, smiled,
and talked, and jerked their eyebrows.

CHAPTER XXXIV

The nest on the Spaniard's Road had not been able to contain Sheila
long. There are certain natures, such as that of Felix, to whom the
claims and exercise of authority are abhorrent, who refuse to exercise
it themselves and rage when they see it exercised over others, but
who somehow never come into actual conflict with it. There are other
natures, such as Sheila's, who do not mind in the least exercising
authority themselves, but who oppose it vigorously when they feel
it coming near themselves or some others. Of such is the kingdom of
militancy. Her experience with the police had sunk deep into her soul.
They had not, as a fact, treated her at all badly, which did not prevent
her feeling as if they had outraged in her the dignity of woman. She
arrived, therefore, in Hampstead seeing red even where red was not. And
since, undoubtedly, much real red was to be seen, there was little other
color in the world or in her cheeks those days. Long disagreements with
Alan, to whom she was still a magnet but whose Stanley-like nature stood
firm against the blandishments of her revolting tongue, drove her more
and more toward a decision the seeds of which had, perhaps, been planted
during her former stay among the breezy airs of Hampstead.

Felix, coming one day into his wife's study--for the house knew not
the word drawing-room--found Flora, with eyebrows lifted up and
smiling lips, listening to Sheila proclaiming the doctrine that it was
impossible not to live 'on one's own.' Nothing else--Felix learned--was
compatible with dignity, or even with peace of mind. She had, therefore,
taken a back room high up in a back street, in which she was going to
live perfe