“COURAGE!” said Pip, “Be — hey-good to her,” waving to the outgoing train. He slid out of sight past the windows and the young couple were off for their honeymoon. . . .

Edward Albert had slumped into his seat. “Wish I knew who frew that last slipper,” he said. “All bruised I am. Someone must’ve delib’ratly buzzed it straight at my face. Ugh!”

He shut his eyes.

“Merried,” he said, and said no more.

She seated herself diametrically opposite to him.

For a time they sat in silence.

She was perplexed by a disconcerting little incident that had just occurred. A radiant railway official had taken them in charge, led them along the platform and ushered them to their reserved compartment. “Wish you all happiness,” he said, and stood waiting. Edward Albert looked in dull interrogation at his bride. “Wans a tip, I s’pose,” he said, fumbled in his pocket and produced sixpence. The man stared at the coin with a hostile expression and made no movement. Matters hung in suspense.

“All right Evangeline! My affair,” said Pip, and had drawn the resentful official out of the apartment and brightened his face on the platform.

“I suppose” (hiccup) “I can do what I like with my own money,” said Edward Albert answering her unspoken protest.

“But he expected more. Dressed up as we are! He looked so astonished and hurt. He didn’t like you, Teddy.”

“Well, I didn’t like ‘is face either.”

He seemed to think the incident concluded. But this assertion that he meant to do what he liked with his own money came as a clear definition of a disposition already very plainly apparent. He had evidently been thinking things over and he had got one reality very clear in his mind. He had the power of the purse. He had insisted on paying himself for every incidental expense for which Pip had not provided already. (Pip’s bill was to come in later.) Evangeline studied his sulky face across the carriage. Edward Albert had never been drunk before and the temporary exhilaration of Old Gooseberry was apt to be followed by an uncomfortable obstinacy.

Her immediate disposition was to leave him alone. But for some days she had been anticipating this moment and preparing a little speech for him, that would readjust their relations on a saner basis. And that former resolution was still sufficiently strong to prevail over her discretion.

“Teddy,” she said, “Listen to me.”

He did not open his eyes. “Wassit?” he asked.

“Teddy, we’ve got to make the best of all this. I was a fool to fall in love with you in the first place — oh, yes, I was in love with you right enough — but I fell out quicker than I fell in. Kidnapping — she said. What was her name? Blame. Détournement des mineurs. Are you listening? Face things as they are. You’re young, Teddy, even for your years. And I’m a grown-up woman.”

“Don wan argue. Thing’s done s’done. Wish I knew who chucked that slipper. . . . Couldn’t have been old Pip. . . . Pip wount done thin’ like that.”

Nothing more to be said. She sat back, disregarding him. She felt intolerably sober. She wished she had let herself go like the rest of them with Veuve Gooseberry, She tried to reassemble her ideas. She had entered upon a new sort of life in which there would be no weekly pay day. She had never thought of that before and at the time the prospect scared her unduly. . . .

She went out into the corridor and contemplated the flying landscape. She looked over her shoulder and then resorted to the privacy of the lavatory. There she counted her available money. She had ￡2.11s.6d. Not much. And no more to come.

She returned to their apartment.

He had shifted. He was in the middle of the carriage now with his hands on the seat arms and he was making a queer noise between snoring and sobbing. He was partly asleep and wholly drunk. She stood for a long time regarding him.

“Tu n’as voulu,” Georges what is it? — Dindon? — Chose?” she whispered to herself. “He used to say that and laugh at me.”

And then, “What was that other one he used to laugh at? As a girl falls so shall she lie. . . . Nothing to laugh at now.”

Well, she was in a fix and somehow she would get out of it. When one looked at her antagonist, there was nothing really for aidable about him. She glanced at the panel of looking — glass above the back of the seat and she realised that her grey going-away dress suited her very well. She nodded to her reflection reassuringly.

She posed to herself, admiring and sympathising with, herself. She saw herself brilliant, generous^ passionate, unfortunate and still undaunted.

“I’ve got no right to hate him,” she said. “But it’s going to be hard not to. This money business. That’s something new. Evadne, my dear, you never dreamt of that. Somehow that must be put straight. Think it out. Put him to bed to-night and talk sense to him tomorrow.”

At Torquay Station she felt she had the situation well in hand. She got the porters tipped generously by saying, “His fee is half a crown,” and she settled handsomely with the cabdriver by the same device. “Thish Torquay don’t arf charge,” said her spouse.

“Nothing is dear if it’s good,” she said, partly to him and partly to the hotel porter.

And having pacified her lord and sent him to sleep, she lay awake beside him in a reverie.

Before her acutely wakeful mind passed a pageant of beautiful women down the ages who had had to give their bodies to dwarfed kings and ugly feudal lords, rich merchants, influential statesmen, millionaires, with far less desire than had served her turn. And all the women in this procession were strangely alike; reasonably tall, bright-eyed, with shadowy black hair and a dark warmth of skin; each indeed was her own dreamself in a thousand lovely costumes, sacrificial always but still proud and self-contained. One lady on a white horse, however, wore no costume at all, Lady Godiva. Venus the prey of Vulcan also, was scanty. Anne Boleyn was rich by contrast. A splendid figure was Esther, purified, anointed, and in robes of the utmost frankness and splendour, jingling like a sistrum, going into the King, conquering by her dark loveliness, conquering by submission. Always she submitted rather than gave, holding back a precious jewel of self-abandonment that was hers, her own unexplored essence. She controlled the brute for fine and generous ends.

Was this after all what wifehood amounted to?

For most women perhaps — yes.

Was there ever a true love between husband and wife? There was obligation in it and obligation kills love. There was an excessive proximity. You saw the creature too closely. The advantage of an amant was that you didn’t have to live with him.

There was someone she had been trying to forget, but the word amant translated itself into English and the desire for love flooded her being. . . . True love . . .

Her imaginative posturing came to an............