It
lies nearer to the racial essence and perhaps to the divine; it can, at
all events, overleap one grave.

XXXII

Mr. Pembroke did not receive a clear account of what had happened when
he returned for the interval. His sister--he told her frankly--was
concealing something from him. She could make no reply. Had she gone
mad, she wondered. Hitherto she had pretended to love her husband. Why
choose such a moment for the truth?

"But I understand Rickie's position," he told her. "It is an unbalanced
position, yet I understand it; I noted its approach while he was ill.
He imagines himself his brother's keeper. Therefore we must make
concessions. We must negotiate." The negotiations were still progressing
in November, the month during which this story draws to its close.

"I understand his position," he then told her. "It is both weak and
defiant. He is still with those Ansells. Read this letter, which thanks
me for his little stories. We sent them last month, you remember--such
of them as we could find. It seems that he fills up his time by writing:
he has already written a book."

She only gave him half her attention, for a beautiful wreath had just
arrived from the florist's. She was taking it up to the cemetery: today
her child had been dead a year.

"On the other hand, he has altered his will. Fortunately, he cannot
alter much. But I fear that what is not settled on you, will go. Should
I read what I wrote on this point, and also my minutes of the interview
with old Mr. Ansell, and the copy of my correspondence with Stephen
Wonham?"

But her fly was announced. While he put the wreath in for her, she ran
for a moment upstairs. A few tears had come to her eyes. A scandalous
divorce would have been more bearable than this withdrawal. People
asked, "Why did her husband leave her?" and the answer came, "Oh,
nothing particular; he only couldn't stand her; she lied and taught him
to lie; she kept him from the work that suited him, from his friends,
from his brother,--in a word, she tried to run him, which a man won't
pardon." A few tears; not many. To her, life never showed itself as a
classic drama, in which, by trying to advance our fortunes, we shatter
them. She had turned Stephen out of Wiltshire, and he fell like a
thunderbolt on Sawston and on herself. In trying to gain Mrs. Failing's
money she had probably lost money which would have been her own. But
irony is a subtle teacher, and she was not the woman to