bin Pierce, Sir Donald, perhaps others.
And these few believers gave Lady Holme courage. She remembered them,
she relied on them at this moment.

"I'm not wicked," she repeated.

She looked into her husband's face.

"Don't you know that?"

He was silent.

"Perhaps you'd rather I was," she continued. "Don't men prefer it?"

He stared first at her, then at the carpet. A puzzled look came into his
face.

"But I don't care," she said, gathering resolution, and secretly
calling, calling on the hidden woman, yet always with a doubt as to
whether she was there in her place of concealment. "I don't care. I
can't change my nature because of that. And surely--surely there must be
some men who prefer refinement to vulgarity, purity to--"

"Ulford, eh?" he interrupted.

The retort struck like a whip on Lady Holme's temper. She forgot the
believers in the angel and the angel too.

"How dare you?" she exclaimed. "As if I--"

He took up the latch-key and thrust it into her face. His sense of
physical triumph was obviously dying away, his sense of personal outrage
returning.

"Good women don't do things like that," he said. "If it was known in
London you'd be done for."

"And you--may you do what you like openly, brazenly?"

"Men's different," he said.

The words and the satisfied way in which they were said made Lady Holme
feel suddenly almost mad with rage. The truth of the statement, and the
disgrace that it was truth, stirred her to the depths. At that moment
she hated her husband, she hated all men. She remembered what Lady
Cardington had said in the carriage as they were driving away from the
Carlton after Mrs. Wolfstein's lunch, and her sense of impotent fury
was made more bitter by the consciousness that women had chosen that
men should be "different," or at least--if not that--had smilingly given
them a license to be so. She wanted to say, to call out, so much that
she said nothing. Lord Holme thought that for once he had been clever,
almost intellectual. This was indeed a night of many triumphs for him.
An intoxication of power surged up to his brain.

"Men's made different and treated differently," he said. "And they'd
never stand anything else."

Lady Holme sat down again on the sofa. She put her right hand on her
left hand and held it tightly in her lap.

"You mean," she said, in a hard, quiet voice, "that you may humiliate
your wife in the eyes of London and that she must just pretend that she
enj