Plain sewing for grown men and women, Dinah promptly decided, was fruitless labour. Of dressmaking proper Gaston would never (excusably, perhaps) suffer a trace in his rooms. And so, the sweet fashioning of tiny children’s clothes not belonging to her lot, Dinah Arbuthnot it would seem had no choice, no refuge on the planet she inhabited, but cross-stitch. At moments of more than common loneliness she would feel that her life was being recorded--mournfully, for a life of two-and-twenty--in these large and not artistic embroideries. It seemed as though she stitched with a double thread, as though a dull strand of autobiography for ever intertwined itself among the flaunting roses, the impossible auriculas and poppies that grew beneath her hands. The piece at which she now worked was begun in London, at a time when Gaston used to dine out regularly every night of his life, and when his days, from various art callings, were, perforce, spent apart from her. As Geoffrey spoke, she could see her St. John’s Wood lodging, her afternoon walks in the Regent’s Park, worked gloomily in with every shade of those topmost yellow roses. After London came a short stay at Weymouth. Here Gaston had a ‘convict study’ to make, on order, and with his usual good luck discovered he knew several capital fellows in the regiment quartered at Portland. The capital fellows naturally delighted in having the versatile artist at mess, and Dinah passed almost as many lonely evenings as she had done in London. It was in Weymouth, she remembered, that her auriculas, her impossible auriculas, began to take colour and shape. And now, in Guernsey.... The heavy drops gathered in Dinah Arbuthnot’s eyes; pushing her work frame away, she turned to Geoffrey. The lamp shone on her full. The delicate outlines of her cheek and throat stood out before him in startling whiteness. ‘And so you have come back from your coaching, Geff.’ Her tone was quiet. Long practice had taught Dinah to repress that sound detested by Gaston--as by all husbands--tears in the voice. ‘How do you like the sensation of being snubbed by an heiress?’ ‘Pretty well, I thank you,’ said Geff. ‘Snubbing, as you know, Mrs. Arbuthnot, is a sensation I got used to in my youth.’ ‘Was the heiress very bad? Did she make you feel miserably uncomfortable?’ ‘No, I cannot go so far as that. I cannot say that I felt miserably uncomfortable.’ ‘But you don’t care for her? If you keep the work on, it will not be for pleasure?’ Dinah’s heart was fuller than it could hold with love for her husband. Geoffrey was nothing to her, except the best friend that she and Gaston possessed. Yet she asked this question quickly, with interest. In her secret consciousness it was an accepted fear, perhaps, though Dinah knew it not, that Geoffrey would never care, as men care who mean to marry, for any girl. ‘Work that is to be decently done must always be done for pleasure.’ It was Geff Arbuthnot who uttered the aphorism.