ry refinement!
From the very first, she had run after Maurice. "She is capable of
_kissing_ him," Eleanor told herself; "and saying she did it because he
was like a brother!" Strangely enough, in this blaze of jealousy she had
no flicker of resentment at Lily! Lily (now that she had seen her) was
to Eleanor merely the woman to whom Jacky belonged. Looking back on
those months that followed her discovery of Lily, and contrasting the
agony she had felt then with her despair about Edith now, she was
faintly surprised at the difference in her pain. This was probably
because faithlessness of the body is not so deadly an insult to Love as
faithlessness of the mind. But Eleanor did not, of course, make any such
explanation. She just said to herself that Maurice had been a boy when
he had been untrue to her, and she herself had been, in some ways, to
blame; and he had confessed, and been forgiven. So Lily was now of no
consequence--except as she interfered with Eleanor's passionate wish to
have Jacky. So she did not hate Lily, or fear her (though she was
humiliated at that car fare!). But she did hate Edith, and fear of her
was agony.... So she would, somehow, keep her out of the house!

Just as she was getting into bed, she wiped her eyes, then cringed at a
gust of perfumery--and realized that she had brought Lily's handkerchief
back with her! It was a last abasement: the woman's horrible
handkerchief. She burst into hysterical weeping.... The next morning,
when she came down to breakfast, her face was haggard with those
ravaging tears, and with the fatigue of hating. Even before she had her
coffee, she burned the scented scrap of machine-embroidered linen,
pressing it down between the logs in the library fireplace; but she
could not burn her hate; it burned her!

She was so worn out that when, a little before luncheon, Edith suddenly
came breezily in, she was, at first, too confused to know what to say to
her.... It was an incredibly mild day; on the shady side of the back
yard there was still a sooty heap of melting snow, but the sky was
turquoise, soaring without a cloud and brimmed with light, so that the
shadows of the bare branches of the poplar, clear-cut like jet,
crisscrossed on the brick path; in the border, the brown fangs of the
tulips had bitten up through the wet earth, and two militant crocuses
had raised their tight-furled purple standards. Eleanor, tempted by the
sunshine, had come here, muffled up in an elde