Page:Dark Hester.djvu/127

same, don’t you think?’ said Norah, ‘to hold a man if he wants to be free?’

‘Does a man like that want any further freedom than he takes?’

‘Well—if there was someone whom he couldn’t get unless he married them, he would want it, wouldn’t he? And it’s rather revengeful to keep a man against his will I think.’

‘But it must be rather difficult not to be revengeful under her particular circumstances,’ said Monica. She seemed to feel the rusty cut in the heart of Captain Ingpen’s peevish wife.

It was late when she reached home and she had only time to arrange her fruit and flowers before dressing for dinner. The parlour-maid announced Captain Ingpen as she tied the last knot of her tea gown and she stood for a moment feeling a sudden reluctance that recalled to her, not so much Captain Ingpen and his ambiguities, as her own girlhood when, all dressed before a dance, she had used to stand at the head of the staircase in her father’s house and feel afraid, but rather deliciously afraid, of all that might befall below. The old waltz tune of the nineties surged into her mind again and she remembered that Charlie had befallen her at a dance. She had worn a tight pink satin bodice and a full