She and Robert were not like that. Thank God, they were still pilgrims. After all, her life had been a big spacious thing in spite of India, because of India and, even more, because of Robert. Only she did not want to think about it now. Just to go on repeating to herself: "I'm at home. I'm in England." And she was going to stay with St. John. How excited she would have been four years ago. How her heart had beaten when she heard his footsteps, how she had thrilled when he had said "dear" to her. She remembered the care he had taken of her, the beautiful considerate devotion he had always shown her when she was longing so passionately for other things, trying with all her might and main to make him lose his head. _How_ badly she had behaved. She could wonder now dispassionately whether he had _ever_ been in love with her. On the whole, she thought, he never had. If she had not been married--it was a silly "if." The most he had said was "you make things very difficult," not a very satisfactory avowal when you came to think it over calmly. But she remembered how it had thrilled her at the time--what a blank cheque of possibilities it had seemed. She remembered, too, the evening when he had talked seriously to her--very gently, very tenderly, very gravely. She had thought he was going to say, "I don't want to be made unhappy," and, instead, he had said, "I don't want you to be unhappy." That had been a nasty one. How she had lashed him with her tongue! What inexhaustible reserves of icy acid she had brought forward. She had tried to hurt him as much as ever she could. How hurt had he been? She wondered. It was all such very ancient history. And yet he had gone on being fond of her. Fonder and fonder--men were so odd. So many things had happened since then. She had been away and he had lost an uncle and inherited a property. And now she was going to stay with him. Last time they had met, two years ago, he had talked to her as if they had had a boy and girl affair thirty years before. She had been very much amused but she had hidden it; hiding your amusement was an essential part of being fond of St. John--a rule of the game, so to speak. That was one of the delightful things about him; to like him at all you had to be really devoted to him and when you had reached that stage, all of the qualities that would have been intolerable in other people became subtly lovable. Somehow they seemed to creep under your wing, compelling you to give them the protection of your own intimate understanding. It was impossible not to make pets of St. John's defects. Ariadne remembered the way he had always tried to keep her out of moral draughts, how he had hated to see her in a room with any one of a doubtful reputation, how her habit of taking off her hat in motors in towns got on his nerves. "But if it tires my head," she would say, and he would explain very seriously what an intimate gesture it was.