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I SUPPOSE I have hated her from the first moment I saw her,’ Monica Wilmott heard herself saying, and she saw Hester as she had first seen her, sitting in the open window of the Chelsea drawing-room against the background of the river; extraordinarily quiet, extraordinarily assured, with black eyebrows and a thin black cloak lined with red.

She had thought of Hester almost constantly since Clive had married her, but this habit of thinking aloud had crept upon her only since she had come to live alone in Essex, and it frightened her a little when she caught herself at it; it was dangerous, as anything automatic in life might be dangerous; a thing like that, said aloud, became much more real; more real than it was; one might shut oneself up in the cell of a self-suggestion if one listened to it. So now, on this solitary afternoon, darkened by cold summer rain, she rose from the window-seat where she had been looking out at the village-green, and