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folded arms, in her red jumper, against the door, and she made Monica think of a picture she had seen of a young condemned revolutionary sitting up, proud, perverse, unvindictive, to be shot. Her face was the strangest colour; the colour of a white passion-flower, its surface bloom bruised from the petals and the purple pulp showing through. Her eyes were like the flower’s dark centre; bruised, too; soft and expanded; there was no fierceness in Hester’s eyes to-day. ‘It was mistake, then, on your side, from the very beginning, Hester,’ said Monica. ‘Clive was not inside with me. He never once came inside. It was I who was put out; not you. It was you who had put me out;—me and my obsolete standards.’

Hester’s eyes did not move from the window. ‘Of course that was what you felt. That was what Clive meant you to feel; that was what he did for me. Because it was I, not you, who was making him suffer, and he had to hide it from me. I made him suffer from the beginning, because I was too different from you. It wasn’t only in one standard; it was in all the standards; down to the way you dressed and the jokes you had together. He was always hiding from me, poor Clive; in the little things as well as the big ones. It’s impossible in