e and she had me at her mercy. She held me in the blaze.

"I suppose," she said, "I'm to think of your everlasting meddling with my
affairs?"

I pointed out that a charge of meddling came rather oddly from a lady who
honoured me by staying in my house because she preferred it to her
husband's.

"You know perfectly well why I'm staying in your house; and if you don't,
Norah does. I could have stayed with my father, for that matter."

I said I thought that that was extremely doubtful--in the circumstances.

I had her there, and she knew it, for she retired in bad order on an
irrelevant point. She said I was no judge of the circumstances.

I said peaceably that perhaps I wasn't, but that she must own that I had
behaved as if I were. At any rate I'd given her the benefit of the doubt.

She said, "You talk as if I'd been through the Divorce Court. Perhaps
that's where you think I ought to be. The benefit of the doubt! You
certainly _have_ given it me. It's been nothing but doubt with you,
Walter, ever since I knew you. You always thought awful things about me.
I know you have. I could _see_ you thinking them. You thought vile things
about me, and vile things about Jimmy. You came rushing out to Belgium
because you thought them. And the other day you thought the same thing of
me and Charlie Thesiger, and you came rushing after me again and giving
me away, and behaving so that everybody else would think me awful too."

"My dear child, you owned yourself that Charlie--"

"Oh--Charlie! As if he mattered! He was only being an ass--the war upset
him, or something. I don't care what you think about Charlie--he doesn't
either--but why you should go out of your way to think _me_ awful--"

I said I thought we'd done with that.

"No," she said, "we haven't done with it. I want to get to the bottom of
it. What _makes_ you do these things? I believe you _want_ to make out
that I'm horrid, just as you wanted to make out that poor little Jimmy
was, when I went to him in Bruges."

She went on. "I can understand _that_, because I did go to him, and I--I
cared for him and you didn't like it. I can even understand your wanting
_me_ to be horrid then, because it made it easier for you. I had the
sense to see that that was all that was the matter with you _then_, so I
didn't mind. But why on earth you should keep it up like this! What can
it matter to you _now_ whether I'm nice or horrid?"

She had rushed on, carried away by her own