Lying in his white bed, the sheets up to his chin, his face dark in the blaze of light, from above his head--the only dark object, indeed, in a room that was all monastically white--his tongue was so dry that he was unable to moisten his lips with it. He lay perfectly still, gazing at Peter’s silver collar that, taken off for the night, hung from the hook on the back of the white door. His lips muttered fragments of words with which his mind had nothing to do. They bubbled up from within him as if from the depths of his soul, and at that moment Robert Grimshaw knew himself. He was revealed to himself for the first time by words over which he had no control. In this agony and this prickly sweat the traditions--traditions that are so infectious--of his English public-school training, of his all-smooth and suppressed contacts in English social life, all the easy amenities and all the facile sense of honour that is adapted only to the life of no strain, of no passions; all these habits Were gone at this touch of torture. And it was of this intolerably long anguish that he had been thinking when he had said to Etta Stackpole that in actual truth he was only a Dago. For Robert Grimshaw, if he was a man of many knowledges, was a man of no experiences at all, since his connection with Katya Lascarides, her refusal of him, her shudderings at him, had been so out of the ordinary nature of things that he couldn’t make any generalizations from them at all. When he had practically forced Dudley Leicester upon Pauline, he really had believed that you can marry a woman you love to your best friend without enduring all the tortures of jealousy. This sort of marriage of convenience that it was, was, he knew, the sort of thing that in their sort of life was frequent and successful enough, and having been trained in the English code of manners never to express any emotion at all, he had forgotten that he possessed emotions. Now he was up against it. He was frightfully up against it. Till now, at least, he had been able to imagine that Dudley Leicester had at least a devouring passion for, a quenchless thirst to protect, his wife. It had been a passion so great and commencing so early that Grimshaw could claim really only half the credit of having made the match. Indeed, his efforts had been limited to such influence as he had been able to bring to bear upon Pauline’s mother, to rather long conversations in which he had pointed out how precarious, Mrs. Lucas being dead, would be Pauline’s lot in life. And he had told her at last that he himself was irretrievably pledged, both by honour and by passion, to Katya Lascarides. It was on the subsequent day that Pauline had accepted her dogged adorer.