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marriage, I see that now, if the wife is so different, and the man loves his mother so much. I was very slow in seeing the truth. I was a complacent dolt, of course. But by degrees it came over me that Clive was unhappy, fearfully unhappy; that he was thinking about you all the time, and wondering. He used to call out in his sleep—oh, we joked about it, of course, and pretended it was his nerves;—but I began to see that he called out for you because his heart was full of you and he was wondering if you weren’t miserable down here, alone, with nothing in your life. You played up awfully well, Monica; allow me to say that. I watched you carefully, and I watched him, and I saw that you gave him nothing to go on. But he knew perfectly well that you couldn’t stand me and that you removed yourself lest you should be forced to show it. He saw that you couldn’t stand me, and he saw why,’ and round Hester’s lips there now crept the shadow of the bitter savour. ‘He saw why just as well as you did; better than you did;—And shall I tell you why he could go on standing me?—Simply and solely because he was still in love with me; simply because of sex; nothing else. It was that you were sacrificed to. A man will always sacrifice his mother to the woman he’s in love with, I suppose, and a