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‘Then why refuse to have mere wedding-cake—if it pleases your foolish mother-in-law?’

‘Because she wants to be straight. I do see that about her, Monica.—She wants to be straight, more than anything.—Please don’t start wrong; it will make Clive so miserable;—already he’s afraid,’ Celia murmured while Monica now wept openly.

She turned now from the fire and went back to the window-seat and again looked out at the driving rain. Her mind travelled over the past five years and saw Hester always the same, imperturbably pursuing her own way and making it Clive’s; but there was no injury to recall, no fault to record. If Clive’s friends had not cared for his wife and had tended to fall away, that was not Hester’s fault. If Clive looked a little dimmed and dumb and out of the picture that Hester put him in, he never looked unhappy. He never looked unhappy when he was with Hester; it was only with her, his mother, that Clive was, gently, silently, ill at ease. It was her relationship with her son that was ruined, or almost ruined; because she could not like his wife. She had tried to; faithfully, if desperately. She recalled the parties she had gone to, in the little Chelsea house that had been her wedding-