urb thy calm. Ah! If thou wert a
general at the front! What sang-froid! What presence of mind! But I--"

He bent towards her, and she suddenly sprang up and seized him round
the neck, and ate his lips, and while she strangled and consumed him
she kept muttering to him:

"Hope not that I shall thank thee. I cannot. I cannot! The words with
which I could thank thee do not exist. But I am thine, thine! All of
me is thine. Humiliate me! Demand of me impossible things! I am thy
slave, thy creature! Ah! Let me kiss thy beautiful grey hairs. I love
thy hair. And thy ears ..."

The thought of her insatiable temperament flashed through her as
she held him, and of his northern sobriety, and of the profound,
unchangeable difference between these two. She would discipline
her temperament; she would subjugate it. Women were capable of
miracles--and women alone. And she was capable of miracles.

A strange, muffled noise came to them across the darkness of the
sitting-room, and G.J. raised his head slightly to listen.

"Repose! Repose thyself in the arms of thy little mother," she
breathed softly. "It is nothing. It is but the wind blowing the blind
against the curtains."

And later, when she had distilled the magic of the hour and was
tranquillised, she said:

"And where is it, this flat?"

Chapter 39

IDYLL

Christine said to Marie, otherwise La Mere Gaston, the new servant
in the new flat, who was holding in her hand a telegram addressed to
"Hoape, Albany":

"Give it to me. I will put it in front of the clock on the
mantelpiece."

And she lodged it among the gilt cupids that supported the clock on
the fringed mantelpiece in the drawing-room. She did so with a little
gesture of childlike glee expressing her satisfaction in the flat as a
whole.

The flat was dark; she did not object, loving artificial light. The
rooms were all very small; she loved cosiness. There was a garage
close by, which might have disturbed her nights; but it did not. The
bathroom was open to the bedroom; no arrangement could be better. G.J.
in enumerating the disadvantages of the flat had said also that it
was too much and too heavily furnished. Not at all. She adored the
cumbrous and rich furniture; she did not want in her flat the empty
spaces of a ball-room; she wanted to feel that she was within an
interior--inside something. She gloried in the flat. She preferred it
even to her memory of G.J.'s flat in the Albany. Its golden orn